Big Data...What is it ?

Without a doubt, Big Data is considered one of the most important IT trends of recent time, and many would say a business imperative. But what really is it?

In this article, I summarize insights from a text I have been reading, Harness the Power of Big Data.

1. Big Data has nothing to do with the size of data, but rather, the ability to perform analytics on a broader spectrum of data, and gain a competitive advantage from the insights gained
2. The ability to instrument and capture data, not only data that is stored (at rest) but also data in motion (data being generated in realtime), an perform analytics on the whole population of this data, is a key requirement. 
3. Big Data is typically defined using the 3 Vs; volume, variety and velocity. IBM added an additional V, veracity.
1. Volume; Data growth between 2009 and 2011 is estimated at 80%. Six years from now, data is estimated to be around 35 Zeta Bytes, equivalent to about 4 trillion 8GB iPods.
2. Variety; This relates to the need to capture all data that could be useful for the decision making process, structured or otherwise.
3. Velocity; This relates to the ability to analyze, process and gain insights from data as it becomes available.
4. Veracity; Big Data can contain a lot of inaccurate / untrustworthy data. Veracity relates the process of transforming Big Data into trustworthy data and discarding the noise.