Big Data sounds like another buzzword, but it does hold significant business potential. It goes hand-in-hand with cloud adoption as it can use the cloud’s flexibility and virtually unlimited computing resources. For companies that prefer to keep all their data under their own roof, the vendors offer a wide variety of high-performance servers, storage, and dedicated analytic and database appliances that can help handle huge amounts of data and information sets.

"Big Data is big! It is a theme that has jumped to center stage in the IT world,” says IDC’s Research Director Thomas Vavra. “You can no longer pick up a publication about IT without seeing the term everywhere. It's easy to see why many would want to dismiss this development as nothing more than a lot of hype and marketing. Do so at your own peril. The foundations for the discussion around Big Data are simple and undeniable: We are going to keep producing more data at greater velocities. We can either ignore it, quarantine it, save it "just because", or try and make use of it. Big Data is a new reality, brought about by changing IT landscapes, devices, and all the data they generate. As such, it is the beginning of a new dialogue between IT providers and end users to address that reality.”

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