James Kobielus, senior program director, Big Data Analytics at IBM contributed an article on October 30 to Wired. Titled “Five Ways to Move Your Big Data Projects Into the Cloud”, this article provides an excellent overview of why companies should be looking to cloud computing technology to handle their mountains and mountains of data.
With the continuing growth of data that companies must store, manage and analyze, it is essential that they find ways to leverage that data to make better business decisions. According to IBM (2013), 90 percent of the world’s existing data has been created in the past two years and according to an IDC study, by 2020 more than 44 zettabytes of data will exist. With this wealth of data, how can businesses turn it into actionable information to fuel growth?
In the article, Kobielus says that the “abundance of data, emergence of cloud and advances in analytics mean data-driven decisions can now be essential, daily and valuable activity for all types of business people – not just data scientists.”
Kobielus offers five key reasons executives need to be able to leverage the cloud to be able to analyze this abundance of data, including:
- Build the business case for big data in the cloud
- Assess workloads
- Develop a technical approach
- Address requirements, including privacy, security and compliance
- Deploy, integrate and make operation ready
With the cloud providing a way to easily access and share applications within and among businesses throughout the world, it is a logical platform for big data analytics that every business should consider.
