"Social Media Is One Of the Major Source For Big data"

Every day we share  millions of posts on Facebook,  tweets on twitter,  texts,videos clips & images on Watsapp, Instagram and various other social media. But, have you ever, thought where all the data gets stored? Does it provide security? Is it safe to use?

Social media is one of the major issue  for the explosion of data over the internet. In the recent years, 2.5  quintillion  bytes of data has been produced. It has increased by 90% for two years and in 2014 it's going to be even more. Earlier, data was stored in storage media like hard drives, pen drives, magnetic tapes etc. You see, sizes vary from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes to terabyte to petabyte to exabyte to zettabyte and even yottabyte. Imagine the size of the data. It's a challenging task for analyzing and processing of such huge data.

Thus,  for defining these massive data generated everyday is called as- "Big Data". Big data is amplified by 4V's i.e. Velocity(How fast data is processed),Volume(the amount of data generated), Variety(it's the size which varies from terabytes to many petabytes of data),  and Veracity (uncertainty of data e.g- hash tags in Twitter, colloquial speeches used in the posts).

Big data can't be managed by conventional tools like Hadoop, MapReduce, BeeHive, NoSQL etc. It's an asset to the various organizations. Therefore,  a lot of backups  & data securities are implemented to prevent the loss of data. If  the infrastucture gets destroyed, it can be constructed over a period of time. But, in case of data it's not the case. Once, lost it can't be retrieved. Loss of Big data means loss to business. Therefore, conventional  tools have been used to protect data. 

Data is categorized to structured & unstructured. Structured includes graphs, databases, pdf file, word doc files etc. Whereas, unstructured includes- images, video clips, audio, emails, all sorts of files in the internet. Unstructured data is the major cause for the rise of the Big data.

The size of Big data is too huge and can't be stored in device. Data lives in the Cloud (intelligent side) and is important for services. Variety of services are available over the internet that delivers computational functionality on clouds. Cloud acts like a skynet i.e. internet in the sky. Hence, it's a storage  for Big data. For instance, we can save our files, images, videos in Google drive.  

Hence, the major challenges faced by Big data are security and privacy concerns. Many Big data companies like IBM, Amazon, Oracle, Google etc. are working on these major issues

Have you ever thought whether, those texts and images which you exchange on watsapp, post on Facebook, twitter etc. are safe? Did you know where your data is getting stored?

Now, that you have a gist about Big data. If you would like to discuss. Please share :)