Big data, from being a buzzword and an emerging technology, has now moved mainstream. More businesses are now adopting big data technologies to take advantage of the huge amount of information now available through various sources.

Data processing has been the main driving force behind the evolution of digital technology, whether you are processing scientific data, business data, or processing data for weather prediction. You need optimal ways to capture, record, organize and access the data to analyze it and get meaningful insights from it.

With the evolution of relational databases, data processing and related technologies like data warehousing and data mining, businesses and non-commercial organizations were able to store and analyze a large amount of data that became available to them.

However, the emergence of the Internet and mobile platforms resulted in an exponential increase in shared and readily available information that could be of value in a number of applications. Everything, from scientific findings to trends in fashion, and reviews on new restaurants are posted on the web.

All this information can be valuable in various contexts, but they are massive in volume, accumulate quickly, and are stored in varied formats – they can be text, images, videos, audio files and much more.

Traditional data processing tools will simply not work as they were mostly designed to gather, store, organize and analyze much less volume of data. The sheer volume, speed, and variety of data now generated require new methodologies and tools. This is where big data comes in. Big data is just that – a huge amount of data or massive datasets. It is also used to refer to the related technologies that have emerged to access and process these like Hadoop.

The Hadoop framework was designed to store and process such huge amounts of data. Using distributed storage and distributed parallel processing this technology enables organizations to store and perform real-time analysis of big data.

Big data opportunities
The big data arena is now getting crowded with more emerging technologies and tools. It is finding applications in fields as varied as farming, businesses, health care, crime prevention etc. This creates a huge opportunity for software professionals, as the country alone will have around 150k new job opportunities in big data analytics. It is time to enroll in good big data courses.

There are now a lot of specializations in this field, with varied job profiles like Big Data Engineer, Machine Learning Scientist, Data Scientist Data Visualization Developer and so on. Training, certifications and big data courses are available from universities, software training institutes, technology companies like IBM, and online training courses.

Getting trained through the best big data courses to upgrade your skills is vital to stay ahead in the technology field. Ignoring big data opportunities could translate into missed opportunities for career advancements and wrong in new and exciting fields.