Exploring Big Data trends in the coming years
Author: Kaushik Pal
Overview –
Big data is going to come in a big way in the coming years. It will also have a significant impact in the analytics world. Big data technology and platform will have a lot of changes and up gradation. So we need to understand the trends in the coming years.
In this article, I will talk about the latest trends in big data world.
Introduction: In the last couple of years there was a lot of discussion on Hadoop and big data technologies. IT industry was also debating a lot on the future of bigdata technologies. The main concern was to check whether Hadoop and bigdata will be a part of main stream technology or it will be kept as a niche area. As we have seen in the past, there were a lot of innovations in technology area, but those were never used in the main stream industry, rather those were used in silos for special computing purposes.
In a very short span of time, bigdata has become the main stream technology. In the year 2013 and 2014, we have seen enterprises are taking initiatives to move bigdata applications into production. In the earlier years it was only a type of POC (proof of concepts), where companies were validating the technology and its output. Now in 2015 and in the coming years, there will be a lot of implementation of new use cases. Most of these uses cases will be based on real time analytics and getting more actionable insights.
In the coming years we will see a huge impact of big data in almost every industry. Data is at the core of every business, so it has to be tapped and analyzed in a proper way. Big data and its related technologies will enable us to capture process and analyze the data to get meaningful insight. So the big data trend will continue to grow and empower us to know the hidden value.
Now, let us have a look at some of the important big data trends in the coming years.
Natural progression of Hadoop vendors: Hadoop is the basic technology platform for big data processing. So hadoop and big data are almost interchangeable in many contexts. The basic hadoop platform does not provide all the flexibilities and advantages. So handling big data processing on this basic hadoop platform is tedious and complex.
Now there are lots of hadoop related technologies like Hive, Pig and many more, which are known as ‘Hadoop eco system’. These technologies are based on hadoop platform and make the big data job more manageable. There are different vendors like Cloudera, MapR, Hortonworks and also IBM, which are providing hadoop technology stacks. These technology platforms are basically built on basic hadoop framework, but more user friendly and compact in nature. It also provides proper user interfaces to work on different processing tasks. As a consequence, companies can focus more on business logic rather than on platform.
The growth of these hadoop vendors will be there in the coming years and their offerings will have a lot of impact. The hadoop vendors will position them as solution providers and help the organizations to implement their big data applications.
Big data and cloud integration: In today’s world, cloud computing and its related infrastructure is inevitable. On the other hand big data applications are growing rapidly. Organizations are implementing more and bigger data applications to get more insight from the valuable data. As we know, big data applications deal with huge volume of data and these data are processed on a clustered environment. The distributed computing is at the core of all big data processing applications. So the distributed computing infrastructure should be maintained properly to overcome failure, errors or any other fatal issues. The cloud environment is the most suitable to cover all these issues. Big data applications can run on this cloud infrastructure (consists of clustered environment) and provide efficient and continuous output. Organization do not need to set its own infrastructure and IT team, instead they can rely on cloud infrastructure, which is also cost effective. So cloud integration with big data is going to come in a big way.
Big data and security issues: Security issues will be a big concern for all big data applications. As we know, data is the key to all big data applications, so we need to understand the security threats well in advance. Organizations are working on big data applications to analyze the structured, semi-structured and unstructured data, which will give then meaningful insight and business direction. This valuable data and its output is the key to all business decisions, and hence confidential to the organization. But unfortunately, all big data applications are not designed considering the security issues. As a result these big data applications will face security threats. So implementing security solutions to big data applications will be a major work in the coming years.
Offering big data as service: We already know about the SaaS model, where applications are running in a cloud environment and uses are using it as a service. The payment model is also flexible, where users only pay when they use it. The same concept is going to be there in big data applications also. Different big data product companies are already hosting their applications in the cloud and expose it as a service. And the users are accessing it as a service and paying on usage basis. In the coming years, more data companies will come as a service provider using cloud environment.
Big data and internet of things (IOT): Internet Of Things (IOT) is the latest buzz word in the tech industry. IOT is basically different devices fitted with sensors for capturing data. Now connecting these data and extracting meaningful output is the biggest challenge. These devices are used in all the places like homes, industries, wearable etc and they are capturing significant amount of data. These sensor data is also a type of big data. Using this data and process it in a big data platform is going to be a big challenge for different organizations.
Conclusion: In this article we have discussed the top big data trends. Apart from these 5 trends, there will be many more challenges and emerging trends visible in the coming years. Cloud and IOT will be there along with big data applications. And there will be a strong bonding among these latest technologies.
