Many of us might not know it: Big data existed long before the Internet of Things became a “thing”. Referring to a vast pool of data generated which can be structured or unstructured; Big Data has evolved to be a driving force of digital transformation. Originally, data scientists believed the amount of data would double every 2 years to reach 40ZB by 2020. That number has since been expected to reach 44ZB ever since Internet of Things became a household name. As more and more devices get connected to the Internet, the goal is to utilize this data to get actionable insights to form business solutions. Let’s learn more about Big Data and IoT before we establish a connection.
Big Data
Every action that we take generates a digital trail. These days communicating with friends over the internet, using social media and every action taken online generates enormous quantities of data. Even the amount of machine-generated data is growing exponentially. The term Big Data involves effectively gathering all this data and using advanced analytics to use it to our advantage.
By comparing more data points, Big Data reveals the complete picture which was previously hidden. More complete answers allow businesses to have more confidence in the data and reward them with a completely different approach to tacking problems.
Internet of Things
IoT is all about smart devices, data, and connectivity. The concept of the Internet of Things aims to bring myriad of devices to a connected ecosystem. The devices which were traditionally not connected to the internet and able to gather data are now equipped with advanced sensors for data collection. The collected data from devices such as wearables, refrigerators, cars and smart homes reveals a lot about the device’s usage pattern.
The Internet of Things is revolutionizing the Big Data and how the vast amount of collected data is stored. Many enterprises use cloud storage options such as PaaS model for data storage rather than using own infrastructures. The end goal of organizations is to harness the incoming data from sensors to discover patterns that help make informed business decisions.
Establishing the Relationship between Big Data and IoT
Companies dealing in the Internet of Things and Big Data are well aware of the fact that data and its analysis are imperative to a disruptive future. Enterprises need to deal with the inundation of data flowing and analyze it in real-time. That’s where Big Data comes to the aid for businesses. Big Data analytics makes it possible to examine data almost immediately to uncover hidden patterns and correlations. As per Gartner, 20.8 billion devices will be used globally by 2020. Thus it becomes essential to choose an analytics solution which is capable of accommodating needs of the growing ingestion and processing.
The Road Forward
As more and more devices continue to join Internet of Things, existing Big Data technologies need to be expanded to effectively manage and extract valuable information from the continuous stream of data inflow. AI technologies like deep learning will play a crucial role to quickly derive actionable insights from the rapid inflow of data.
