Kind of fun playing buzz word bingo. ”The Cloud” which honestly never really made any sense to me has been replaced by “Big Data”. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, big data is exactly what you might think it is – it is a large amount of data, more than you can typically handle with the resources you have available. The challenge is figuring out what to do with all of this stuff. Are you using all of the data you are collecting? Are you optimizing your business/process with the knowledge gained from analyzing the data? Can you analyzing it fast enough, and make changes quick enough for it to be a worthwhile exercise?
Some tools are being developed but the one that seems to be gaining traction is “Hadoop” from the Apache group (Welcome to Apache™ Hadoop™!). Hadoop is a framework that allows you to run applications across multiple machines – essentially giving you a bigger faster computer by piecing together a bunch of not so new and fast computers.
Here’s an image from The Economist’s Information summit in San Francisco: The new information architecture.
