This is a fairly new concept, as a result of which there are a number of experts and researches who have given various definitions of ‘big data’. This term basically refers to huge amounts of structured, semi-structured and raw and unstructured data which can be used in a certain way so as to derive value based information. In spite of having so many different definitions, it is characterized by just three V’s which are, volume, variety and velocity. Breaking these three V’s down, the first V for volume basically refers to the amount of data and its sources. Now, this data can come from a huge melange of sources like, sales records, results of scientific experiments, or various other sources from which data is extracted through various real-time sensors.

While the velocity of data refers to the speed at which any data can be analysed. While data can come across as either pre-processed or entirely raw before the tools of analytics are used on it. For instance any data analytics project will first take in the query, require human assistance as well as data analytics tools to study the data and then render an answer to the query. Thus, human assistance in this field is a big pre-requisite. This may be why there has been an increasing demand for individuals who are well versed with the workings of this field.

The researchers from Berkley University found in a study that the world had produced about 1.5 billion gigabytes of information in the year 1999. When this same study was replicated in the year 2003, it was found that the amount had been doubled in just about 3 years. So by that logic, data was already getting bigger since the year 2001 and now it is believed that, the past few years alone, generated about 90% of the world’s data.

The stock markets of USA see about 7 billion shares being traded daily, while one flights from New York to London generates about 10 Terabytes of Data. The virtual world and social media generates the most amount of data through consumer records of online shopping, through e-commerce websites, websites like twitter generating about 400 million tweets daily and about 3 billion likes get generated on Facebook, per day. With such volumes of data, floating around in the virtual space and cloud around us, there is a pressing need for professionals who excel at turning this data into value based decisions.

These professionals are either known as Data Analysts or Data Scientists and it is their responsibility of extracting the data, structuring it and storing it into servers and studying it so as to derive insights. These tasks are accomplished by them with the help of various data analytics tools like, R Programming, SAS Programming, Python, Hadoop, and SQL and so on. Although the concept of data analytics is just not about the tools and technology, it is more about the way a person understands all the data and its effect on the market as a whole.

With careers in this field called as the sexiest careers of the 21st century, there is a lot of demand from both the companies as well as individuals. This has basically led to increase in the number of institutes offering tailor made specialization programs.

Imarticus Learning is the forerunner in the industry of data analytics programs, which are extremely compatible with the industry standards and provide assured guidance to the candidates regarding the same.