“Big Data” in the Enterprise

Abstract

Humans have been generating data for thousands of years. More recently we have seen an amazing progression in the amount of data produced from the advent of mainframes to client server to ERP and now everything digital. For years the overwhelming amount of data produced was deemed useless. But data has always been an integral part of every enterprise, big or small. As the importance and value of data to an enterprise became evident, so did the proliferation of data silos within an enterprise. This data was primarily of structured type, standardized and heavily governed (either through enterprise wide programs or through business functions or IT), the typical volumes of data were in the range of few terabytes and in some cases due to compliance and regulation requirements the volumes expectedly went up several notches higher.