BIG DATA: The New Information Challenge

Authors：Arnold, Stephen E

Source：Online, 2011, 35(2): 27-29.

In today’s digital world, an organization can expect the amount of digital data to double every 6 or 7 months. The problem is even more severe for large corporations. In the same 6-month period, the Fortune 500 company will have to store twice the data. Its employees will then need to figure out how to locate a specific document, find a relevant email, and comply with a legal e-discovery request. Amazon.com, eBay, Facebook, Google, and telecommunications companies handle hundreds of millions of data events every hour. Google, to cite one example, receives 35 hours of digital video every minute. Amazon processes retail orders and supports thousands of users and their data via the Amazon cloud service. Facebook and its 650 million members generate petabytes of content in the time it takes to fly from New York to Chicago. The buzz of interest around open source technology or, more accurately, software systems is amplified by the growing need to handle big data.