Big Data and Big Data Analytics: How they Differ?

Big data is indeed a big word, at least for corporations all over the world. They incorporate philosophies and techniques of big data and analytics to improve their metrics and tweak every bit of their approach or business strategy.

So, what exactly is the hype over big data? Well, it is just a huge volume of information. This information can range from number of soaps sold to number of downloads to number of employees hired.

However, ‘huge’ sometimes is an understatement for big data. We live in times when enormous quantity of data is generated every second. And this data needs to be analysed thoroughly to gain relevant insights related to business through data mining techniques and analytics methods.

Big data and big data analytics are most definitely related but they differ in certain aspects. Here’s your read to understand both the concepts, and to understand their differences:

What is Big Data?

As said above, big data is nothing but large volumes of data. It includes both structured and unstructured data.

Andrew McAffee and Erik Brynjolfsson, professors at MIT, based their understanding of big data into three terms in an article in Harvard Business Review.  And data is mainly understood by the three V’s introduced by them:

Volume - Recent data records show surprising growth of data with a seemingly exponential rise. Data is everywhere now and there is no lack for sources to accumulate data, thanks to the present technological advancements.

Velocity - The speed and accessibility of data is what makes organizations compete with others with their processing skills. To define it, velocity is the measure of how fast the data is coming in. Just think of Google, the search engine, and the searches every second.

Variety - Big data comes in all forms; pictures, videos, numbers, sound and so on. Ranging from structured and numeric data in traditional databases to unstructured text documents like email, text messages, financial transactions etc. 

What is Big Data Analytics?

The analysis, study and interpretation of big data is what we call big data analytics. The main objective is to derive useful insights from it to solve problems, and to improve the existing values or business approaches.

Measuring the past, present and future statistics simply by connecting trends and patterns of big data really helps in reaching organizational goals. Big data and analytics are slowly becoming a transformational wave in the business world. There are many Big Data Analytics Courses available online and get your data analytics certification to be prepared for the analytics job market!