article: Special Report: The Technology of Business Lotus F1 Team looks to tech to win Hey you, get on to my cloud Domain shift sends cyber world dotty How to cash in with off-the-peg apps Taj Mahal comes to your living room Good question. After all, we've always had large amounts of data haven't we, from loyalty card schemes, till receipts, medical records, tax returns and so on? As Laurie Miles, head of analytics for big data specialist SAS, says: "The term big data has been around for decades, and we've been doing analytics all this time. It's not big, it's just bigger." But it's the velocity, variety and volume of data that has merited the new term. Most traditional data was structured, or neatly organised in databases. Then the world went digital and the internet came along. Most of what we do could be translated into strings of ones and noughts capable of being recorded, stored, searched, and analysed. There was a proliferation of so-called unstructured data generated by all our digital interactions, from email to online shopping, text messages to tweets, Facebook updates to YouTube videos. And the number of gadgets recording and transmitting data, from smartphones to intelligent fridges, industrial sensors to CCTV cameras, has also proliferated globally, leading to an explosion in the volume of data. These data sets are now so large and complex that we need new tools and approaches to make the most of them. Nobody really knows because the volume is growing so fast. Some say that about 90% of all the data in the world today has been created in the past few years. According to computer giant IBM, 2.5 exabytes - that's 2.5 billion gigabytes (GB) - of data was generated every day in 2012. That's big by anyone's standards. "About 75% of data is unstructured, coming from sources such as text, voice and video," says Mr Miles. And as mobile phone penetration is forecast to grow from about 61% of the global population in 2013 to nearly 70% by 2017, those figures can only grow. The US government's open data project already offers more than 120,000 publicly available data sets. The first computers came with memories measured in kilobytes, but the latest smartphones can now store 32GB and many laptops now have one terabyte (1,000GB) hard drives as standard. Storage is not really an issue anymore. For large businesses "the cost of data storage has plummeted," says Andrew Carr, UK and Ireland chief executive of IT consultancy Bull. Businesses can either keep all their data on-site, in their own remote data centres, or farm it out to "cloud-based" data storage providers. A number of open source platforms have grown up specifically to handle these vast amounts of data quickly and efficiently, including Hadoop, MongoDB, Cassandra, and NoSQL. 1,000 bytes = one kilobyte (kB) 1,000 kB = one megabyte (MB) 1,000 MB = one gigabyte (GB) 1,000 GB = one terabyte (TB) 1,000 TB = one petabyte (PB) 1,000 PB = one exabyte (EB) 1,000 EB = one zettabyte (ZB) 1,000 ZB =
summary: As Technology of Business begins a month-long series of features on the theme of Big Data, we kick off with a Q&A backgrounder answering some of those basic questions you were too afraid to ask.