Is Big Data a Key Technology Initiative

Computing programs all over the world have progressed rapidly over the past few years in terms of processing strength, feasibility, dependency, and user reach. There was a time in the late 1960s when students at MIT were using a complex set up to send simple one line messages to their peers across the United States of America. Decades of evolution passed, and today, almost 50 years later, we are standing on the threshold of something new and gigantic. Emerging computing technologies are changing the way we work, we govern, and most importantly the way we think.

 Big data is changing the way people within organizations work together. It is creating a culture in which business and IT leaders must join forces to realize value from all data. Insights from big data can enable all employees to make better decisions—deepening customer engagement, optimizing operations, preventing threats and fraud, and capitalizing on new sources of revenue. But escalating demand for insights requires a fundamentally new approach to architecture, tools and practices.

Big data is an evolving term that describes any voluminous amount of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data that has the potential to be mined for information. Although big data doesn't refer to any specific quantity, the term is often used when speaking about petabytes and exabytes of data.

Big data can be characterized by3Vs: the extreme volume of data, the wide variety of types of data and the velocity at which the data must be must processed. 

The advent of so-called "big data" means that companies, governments and organizations can collect, interpret and wield huge stores of data to an amazing breadth of ends. The emergence of big data has transformed the world of data into a deadly weapon for companies to manipulate. Large amounts of unaccounted data roam the cyberspace today. However, the same technology has been put to intelligent use by scientists and researchers all over the world, using huge data sums to study the changing patterns in our climate and proposing adequate changes for governments all across the globe. 

With huge amounts of data, comes huge amount of responsibility, and this is where data security comes into play. Companies are investing heavily in data security so as to safeguard themselves from cyber attacks that can potentially harm their customers and clients. Data security involves setting up of complex computing systems that enable users to process huge amount of data through filters, thus avoiding the presence of any malware. 

Because big data takes too much time and costs too much money to load into a traditional relational database for analysis, new approaches to storing and analyzing data have emerged that rely less on data schema and data quality. Instead, raw data with extended metadata is aggregated in a data lake and machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) programs use complex algorithms to look for repeatable patterns. 

Big data analytics is often associated with cloud computing because the analysis of large data sets in real-time requires a platform like Hadoop to store large data sets across a distributed cluster and MapReduce to coordinate, combine and process data from multiple sources.

Data is becoming the oil of the information age; a raw material and the foundation of new goods and services. We can tap it because society is rendering into a data format things that never were before, from our friendships (think Facebook) to our whispers (think Twitter) to the way our car engines grunt before a breakdown. It took a decade and billions of dollars to decode the first human genome ten years ago. Today, that same amount of DNA is sequenced in a day. The implications are as huge as the datasets themselves.

Chandigarh University, in collaboration with IBM, has become the first university in North India to design a program in Big Data for engineering students and professionals. The program has been cultivated under the guidance of IBM, and the program has been introduced as the modern IT sector has a surging employment potential for professionals in this field.