With each passing day, we create trillion bytes of data, that is, roughly around 90% of the real-time data in the world today. This massive volume of unstructured data is basically coming from every direction. For instance, congregation of weather information, content posted on social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest), digital images and videos, online transaction and financial markets data to name a few. This data all is collectively known as BIG DATA.

The Big Data space is growing exponentially and its proliferation shows no signs of slowing down in coming next few years. As per IDC, the Big Data market will grow up to $ 16.1 billion in 2014. Plus, it is estimated that the Big Data technology and services market will continue to grow at a 27% CAGR to $ 32.4 billion by 2017.

Nowadays, IT organizations are increasingly turning towards cloud computing as an ideal arrangement to shore up their big data projects. Perhaps, businesses these days are struggling with few questions, like what role does the cloud exactly plays in the seamless deployment of Big Data today and has it really expedited cloud adoption?

 The convergence of two realms - cloud computing and big data - is having sweeping impacts that definitely are changing the world. Big data and cloud technology work in tandem with each other. With cloud computing, any enterprise can now work with unstructured data at a large scale. Since big data environment need clusters of servers to support the tools that process the massive volumes, high speed, and wide-ranging formats of big data, which cloud can provide instantly.

 Although enterprises typically keep their highly sensitive data in-house, enormous volumes of data such as social media data may be located externally. However, where exactly your mission critical data resides-either internally or externally-makes big data in the cloud more appealing in terms of cost effectiveness and gaining quicker insights.

 Discover the Potential of Big Data in Clouds:

Cloud computing provides unlimited, on demand, and elastic computing and data storage resources to businesses. They don't have to bear any upfront expenditure on the construction and deployment of traditional data centers. It completely slashes down the risk of upfront IT investments and enables businesses to scale up and down swiftly simply by adding or removing resources while paying only for the resources they are using.

 Additionally, cloud offers flexibility and efficiency for data access, delivers insights, and drives business value. However, cloud-based big data analytics is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Enterprises using cloud architecture have got multiple options. They can accordingly choose the cloud model simply by weighing various factors, such as workload, cost, security, and data interoperability.

If you want to mitigate risk and maintain control, then you must go ahead with private cloud. Else, use public cloud model to further enhance scalability; or implement a hybrid cloud platform that combines best of the two worlds, that is, private and public cloud resources and services.

 Here are some of the key benefits that cloud offers to businesses:

  • Eliminates computing and storage infrastructure as a limiting factor in meeting unexpected demand.
  • Purges the need to construct IT infrastructure that can manage sudden spikes in activity only to sit inoperative most of the time.
  • Curbs the risk of upfront investment and improves overall cash flow through pay- as-you-use models, charging only for the resources that are actually being used by the end user.

In bottom line, would say no matter which cloud delivery model makes the most sense, organizations with varying business requirements and budgets can harness the potential of big data in cloud environment