Applications

Big data has increased the demand of information management specialists so much so that Software AG, Oracle Corporation, IBM, Microsoft, SAP, EMC, HP and Dell have spent more than $15 billion on software firms specializing in data management and analytics. In 2010, this industry was worth more than $100 billion and was growing at almost 10 percent a year: about twice as fast as the software business as a whole.

Developed economies increasingly use data-intensive technologies. There are 4.6 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, and between 1 billion and 2 billion people accessing the internet. Between 1990 and 2005, more than 1 billion people worldwide entered the middle class, which means more people became more literate, which in turn led to information growth. The world's effective capacity to exchange information through telecommunication networks was 281 petabytes in 1986, 471 petabytes in 1993, 2.2 exabytes in 2000, 65 exabytes in 2007 and predictions put the amount of internet traffic at 667 exabytes annually by 2014. According to one estimate, one-third of the globally stored information is in the form of alphanumeric text and still image data, which is the format most useful for most big data applications. This also shows the potential of yet unused data (i.e. in the form of video and audio content).

While many vendors offer off-the-shelf solutions for big data, experts recommend the development of in-house solutions custom-tailored to solve the company's problem at hand if the company has sufficient technical capabilities.

Governmentedit

The use and adoption of big data within governmental processes allows efficiencies in terms of cost, productivity, and innovation, but does not come without its flaws. Data analysis often requires multiple parts of government (central and local) to work in collaboration and create new and innovative processes to deliver the desired outcome.

CRVS (civil registration and vital statistics) collects all certificates status from birth to death. CRVS is a source of big data for governments.

International developmentedit

Research on the effective usage of information and communication technologies for development (also known as ICT4D) suggests that big data technology can make important contributions but also present unique challenges to International development. Advancements in big data analysis offer cost-effective opportunities to improve decision-making in critical development areas such as health care, employment, economic productivity, crime, security, and natural disaster and resource management. Additionally, user-generated data offers new opportunities to give the unheard a voice. However, longstanding challenges for developing regions such as inadequate technological infrastructure and economic and human resource scarcity exacerbate existing concerns with big data such as privacy, imperfect methodology, and interoperability issues.

Healthcareedit

Big data analytics has helped healthcare improve by providing personalized medicine and prescriptive analytics, clinical risk intervention and predictive analytics, waste and care variability reduction, automated external and internal reporting of patient data, standardized medical terms and patient registries and fragmented point solutions. Some areas of improvement are more aspirational than actually implemented. The level of data generated within healthcare systems is not trivial. With the added adoption of mHealth, eHealth and wearable technologies the volume of data will continue to increase. This includes electronic health record data, imaging data, patient generated data, sensor data, and other forms of difficult to process data. There is now an even greater need for such environments to pay greater attention to data and information quality. "Big data very often means 'dirty data' and the fraction of data inaccuracies increases with data volume growth." Human inspection at the big data scale is impossible and there is a desperate need in health service for intelligent tools for accuracy and believability control and handling of information missed. While extensive information in healthcare is now electronic, it fits under the big data umbrella as most is unstructured and difficult to use. The use of big data in healthcare has raised significant ethical challenges ranging from risks for individual rights, privacy and autonomy, to transparency and trust.

Big data in health research is particularly promising in terms of exploratory biomedical research, as data-driven analysis can move forward more quickly than hypothesis-driven research. Then, trends seen in data analysis can be tested in traditional, hypothesis-driven followup biological research and eventually clinical research.

A related application sub-area, that heavily relies on big data, within the healthcare field is that of computer-aided diagnosis in medicine. One only needs to recall that, for instance, for epilepsy monitoring it is customary to create 5 to 10 GB of data daily. Similarly, a single uncompressed image of breast tomosynthesis averages 450 MB of data. These are just few of the many examples where computer-aided diagnosis uses big data. For this reason, big data has been recognized as one of the seven key challenges that computer-aided diagnosis systems need to overcome in order to reach the next level of performance.

Educationedit

A McKinsey Global Institute study found a shortage of 1.5 million highly trained data professionals and managers and a number of universitiesbetter source needed including University of Tennessee and UC Berkeley, have created masters programs to meet this demand. Private boot camps have also developed programs to meet that demand, including free programs like The Data Incubator or paid programs like General Assembly. In the specific field of marketing, one of the problems stressed by Wedel and Kannan is that marketing has several sub domains (e.g., advertising, promotions, product development, branding) that all use different types of data. Because one-size-fits-all analytical solutions are not desirable, business schools should prepare marketing managers to have wide knowledge on all the different techniques used in these sub domains to get a big picture and work effectively with analysts.

Mediaedit

To understand how the media uses big data, it is first necessary to provide some context into the mechanism used for media process. It has been suggested by Nick Couldry and Joseph Turow that practitioners in Media and Advertising approach big data as many actionable points of information about millions of individuals. The industry appears to be moving away from the traditional approach of using specific media environments such as newspapers, magazines, or television shows and instead taps into consumers with technologies that reach targeted people at optimal times in optimal locations. The ultimate aim is to serve or convey, a message or content that is (statistically speaking) in line with the consumer's mindset. For example, publishing environments are increasingly tailoring messages (advertisements) and content (articles) to appeal to consumers that have been exclusively gleaned through various data-mining activities.

• Targeting of consumers (for advertising by marketers)
• Data capture
• Data journalism: publishers and journalists use big data tools to provide unique and innovative insights and infographics.

Channel 4, the British public-service television broadcaster, is a leader in the field of big data and data analysis.

Insuranceedit

Health insurance providers are collecting data on social "determinants of health" such as food and TV consumption, marital status, clothing size and purchasing habits, from which they make predictions on health costs, in order to spot health issues in their clients. It is controversial whether these predictions are currently being used for pricing.

Internet of Things (IoT)edit

Big data and the IoT work in conjunction. Data extracted from IoT devices provides a mapping of device inter-connectivity. Such mappings have been used by the media industry, companies and governments to more accurately target their audience and increase media efficiency. IoT is also increasingly adopted as a means of gathering sensory data, and this sensory data has been used in medical, manufacturing and transportation contexts.

Kevin Ashton, digital innovation expert who is credited with coining the term, defines the Internet of Things in this quote: “If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things—using data they gathered without any help from us—we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss, and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best.”

Information technologyedit

Especially since 2015, big data has come to prominence within business operations as a tool to help employees work more efficiently and streamline the collection and distribution of information technology (IT). The use of big data to resolve IT and data collection issues within an enterprise is called IT operations analytics (ITOA). By applying big data principles into the concepts of machine intelligence and deep computing, IT departments can predict potential issues and move to provide solutions before the problems even happen. In this time, ITOA businesses were also beginning to play a major role in systems management by offering platforms that brought individual data silos together and generated insights from the whole of the system rather than from isolated pockets of data.