Responsible for the largest and most complicated science experiment, the LHC, CERN has tried to uncover the secrets of the universe. Its major experiments are all in the domain of Big Data. How? Well the LHC single handed generates 30 Petabytes yearly. They use effective data warehousing and Big Data Analytics tools to make sense of such large amounts of raw data. Crunching all the data collected from the 600 million particle collisions per second requires enormous processing power. Distributed computing gives them access to enough processing power and storage capacity otherwise far too costly to build into one data center. The data can be accessed at greater speed by researchers wherever they are in the world now. Read more at:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-data-uncovering-secrets-our-universe-cern-bernard-marr

Big Data is about making something out of enormous and high speed structured data as well as unstructured data, but most organizations do not have a business case for the use of Big Data and invariably, a not so conducive culture to leverage Big Data technologies. The main area of focus in India seems to be-Real Time Reporting on Transaction Systems. Through the partitioning/ clustering, distributed computing and in-memory processing methods, Big Data can run high quality real-time reports, with the ability to drive additional queries. But it will be not be the best use case for Big Data. If we focus on this use case, Information Technology will just end up being a cost center. Big Data investments should address either the fraud prevention story that helps the bottom-line, or the customer offer story that helps the top line of a company. The immediate need however is to get the data fixed to achieve the goal. Data quality continues to remain a huge challenge across more than 80 percent of the mid and large organizations. Read more at:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/perspective/297428/companies-artists