Big data, however you define it, has been praised and vilified. It’s many things to many people: a boon to scientists and retailers, but also an enabling technology for a host of privacy and security threats.
Whether savior or scam — or maybe even a mixture of the two — big data remains a popular topic among pundits, prognosticators, marketers, and security buffs.
So what is it? Wikipedia’s description is a good start: “any collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications.”
Here are some interesting facts:
- Every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the beginning of time until 2003 [Source]
- Over 90% of all the data in the world was created in the past 2 years. [Source]
- It is expected that by 2020 the amount of digital information in existence will have grown from 3.2 zettabytes today to 40 zettabytes. [Source]
- The total amount of data being captured and stored by industry doubles every 1.2 years [Source]
- Every minute we send 204 million emails, generate 1.8 million Facebook likes, send 278 thousand Tweets, and upload 200 thousand photos to Facebook [Source]
- Google alone processes on average over 40 thousand search queries per second, making it over 3.5 billion in a single day. [Source]
- Around 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and it would take you around 15 years to watch every video uploaded by users in one day. [Source]
- Facebook users share 30 billion pieces of content between them every day. [Source]
- AT&T is thought to hold the world’s largest volume of data in one unique database – its phone records database is 312 terabytes in size, and contains almost 2 trillion rows. [Source]
- The amount of data transferred over mobile networks increased by 81% to 1.5 Exabyte’s (1.5 billion gigabytes) per month between 2012 and 2014. Video accounts for 53% of that total. [Source]
You may also want to see interesting video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrNlZ7-SMPk
