Big Data Case Study

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2.1.1.1 The volume of data
Volume is often regarded as the primary attribute of big data. With that in mind, a large number of people define big data in terabytes—sometimes petabytes, but big data can also be quantified by counting records, transactions, tables, or files (Russom, 2011). Volume refers to the mass quantities of data that organizations are trying to harness to improve decision-making across the enterprise (Schroeck et al., 2012). The volumes of data have continued to increase at an unprecedented rate over the last couple of years. The sheer volume of data that is stored or available for storage today is exploding, it is expected that by the year 2020 40 zetabytes (ZB) of data will be stored (Zikopoulos et al. 2012) which according to Schaeffer & Olson (2013) is fifty times more than what is generated today. IBM (2012) has estimated that 2.5 quintrilllion bytes of data are created daily.
The volume of data being stored on a daily basis by businesses these days are immense with IBM (2012) estimating that most companies in the UK have about 100 Terabytes(100,000 gigabytes) of data stored. With this number steadily increasing, the estimation of 40 zetabytes by 2020 could well be surpassed. This gives rise to the introduction of the right technologies to help identify the most useful of the available data. This will ensure that enterprises are well equipped to have a better understanding of their business, customers and the market place they belong to.

2.1.1.2 The Variety of data.
Big data is inherently high variety; The Variety of data represents all types of data weather its unstructured, semi structured (which makes up about 80% of the worlds data) or structured in parts of the decision making and insight process. T...

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...of data and despite this uncertainty, the data still contains valuable information. (IBM, 2012). SAS (2012) indentifies the forth V as Variability which is the daily, seasonal and event-triggered peaks in data, an example of this will be a trending topic on twitter which is difficult if not impossible to manage. It is important to note for enterprises that high data quality is an important big data requirement and also a big challenge, but even top notch data cleansing methods and solutions cannot remove the innate unpredictability of some data (IBM,2012), as earlier mentioned - twitter trends, the economy, the weather or even the future buying decisions of a customer needs to be acknowledged and embraced ,IBM(2012) believe that embracing this uncertainty is a hallmark of big data and executives will need to learn to use these uncertainties to their advantage.

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