Marcia Kaufman

To stay competitive today, companies must find practical ways to deal with big data — that is, to learn new ways to capture and analyze growing amounts of information about customers, products, and services.Data is becoming increasingly complex in structured and unstructured ways. New sources of data come from machines, such as sensors; social business sites; and website interaction, such as click-stream data.

The best way to understand the economics of big data is to look at the various methods for putting big data to work for your organization. While specific costs may vary due to the size of your organization, its purchasing power, vendor relationships, and so on, the classes of expense are fairly consistent. Big data types and sources The most important decisions you need to make with respect to types and sources are What data will be necessary to address your business problem?

To fully understand the capabilities of Hadoop MapReduce, it’s important to differentiate between MapReduce (the algorithm) and an implementation of MapReduce. Hadoop MapReduce is an implementation of the algorithm developed and maintained by the Apache Hadoop project. It is helpful to think about this implementation as a MapReduce engine, because that is exactly how it works.

Clearly, the very nature of the cloud makes it an ideal computing environment for big data. So how might you use big data together with the cloud? Here are some examples: IaaS in a public cloud: In this scenario, you would be using a public cloud provider’s infrastructure for your big data services because you don’t want to use your own physical infrastructure.

Cloud computing has evolved in recent years. The new world of the hybrid cloud is an environment that employs both private and public cloud services. Companies are realizing that they need many different types of cloud services in order to meet a variety of customer needs. The growing importance of hybrid cloud environments is transforming the entire computing industry as well as the way businesses are able to leverage technology to innovate.

Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) is any type of horizontal or vertical business process that’s delivered based on the cloud services model. These cloud services — which include Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) — are therefore dependent on related services.

While the worlds of big data and the traditional data warehouse will intersect, they are unlikely to merge anytime soon. Think of a data warehouse as a system of record for business intelligence, much like a customer relationship management (CRM) or accounting system. These systems are highly structured and optimized for specific purposes.

Many companies are exploring big data problems and coming up with some innovative solutions. Now is the time to pay attention to some best practices, or basic principles, that will serve you well as you begin your big data journey. In reality, big data integration fits into the overall process of integration of data across your company.

Big data is most useful if you can do something with it, but how do you analyze it? Companies like Amazon and Google are masters at analyzing big data. And they use the resulting knowledge to gain a competitive advantage. Just think about Amazon's recommendation engine. The company takes all your buying history together with what it knows about you, your buying patterns, and the buying patterns of people like you to come up with some pretty good suggestions.