Everyone these days seems to be talking about big data. McKinsey & Company stated that the use of big data will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms. But what exactly is big data and how can it affect your business?
In 2012, Gartner defined big data as "high-volume, high-velocity, and/or high variety information assets that require new forms of processing to enable enhanced decision making, insight discovery and process optimization." Essentially, big data is a humongous and highly complex data set, or collection of data sets, that average software cannot capture, store, or analyze. The data includes everything from online purc