Top 10 Reasons to be Thankful for Big Data
Sometimes, you just have to stare a big problem in the eye and be thankful for it. Like how in the world am I ever going to eat all of this dinner? But, we do.
So it is with Big Data. As we enter the Thanksgiving holiday, we thought it might be useful to consider the top 10 reasons why we ought to be thankful for Big Data.
1. It doesn’t byte. It’s just data you know.
2. Most people don’t know it exists or what it is. It’s easy to become an expert fast in ths space as there are no reference models or standards anywhere in sight.
3. Lots of cool new storage devices to play with. Love all the announcements from Dell, Oracle, IBM and others about how to house all of this stuff … feels like the DataCenter days all over again!
4. Hadoop, where would we be without a new technology to play with? Every paradigm shift deserves a new open source tool to fuel it.
5. Lawyers settle before I have to go find it. It would be a real problem if we had to actually be defensible in our data collections.
6. It’s a full employment act for IT! There is no way anyone can come in here from India, China or anywhere else and make sense out of this mess.
7. Buried treasure hunts. Who doesn’t love a challenge? Finding the data someone is looking for reminds me of Willy Wonka and the Golden ticket.
8. Visions of Jack Bauer dancing in our heads. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could have all of our field folks armed like Jack was on 24? Data on demand!
9. It’s justification for our budgets for the next five years. It’s really not that hard to do the math. If you want to avoid fines or even jail, pony up.
10. It will be 2x the size of IT by 2020 … and it’s all ours! We’re going to have a digital universe of 35 zetabytes by then. That’s right zetabytes. If ever there was a trend to sink our teeth in to, it’s Big Data.
Can’t wait to tell everyone over dinner Thursday about what I’m doing this year. Sometimes bigger really is better.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!