Abdul Salam | Cloud Tweaks
The cloud is all about applications, media and information. But of the three, media seems to be the largest with applications coming in at close second, while information ranks last place. But what we are seeing in the last two years suggests that information and other data is gaining ground and will soon overtake the other two in terms of relevance, at least in the non-consumer space, the business side. Experts are calling this “Big Data” and it is all about data processing and analytics.
Everything we do online from social networking to e-commerce purchases, chatting, and even simple browsing yields tons of data that certain organizations collect and poll together with other partner organizations. The results are massive volumes of data, hence the name “Big Data”. This includes personal and behavioral profiles that are stores, managed, and analyzed on demand.
On the more academic side of things, our world is undoubtedly data-driven. We have vast data which comprises knowledge bases from a multitude of disciplines like science with its databases for astronomy, genomics, medicine, zoology, and even environment, weather and transportation data. We also have the Humanities and Social Sciences with its vast resources on historical documents and social interactions data. And then we have Business & Commerce, Entertainment, and social networking which would possibly be the current leader in data growth on a daily basis.
So what can we do with all of these data and where does the cloud come into play. Well, the cloud infrastructure is simply the best platform for the collection, storage, management, and subsequent distribution of all these data. It will allow a lot of cross-referencing with distributed databases and allow scalable analytic innovations because of the accessibility provided by cloud computing. By allowing data scientists to connect to various databases though cloud collaboration, they can make use of distributed computing for faster processing and analysis of the data which will allow for almost instantaneous results. This is of course is still a future possibility that only needs application as it is very possible with the current state of cloud computing technology. In the coming years, Big data will play a pivotal role on the type of applications that will be made available. This might even change the way we interact with the world around us, as information becomes more easily available and less private.
