Big data is one of the major trends of the 2000s. The treatment of these volumes of massive data represents a huge challenge, both intellectual and economic.

Big data or big data describes all of the digital data created by the utilization of new technologies for personal or professional purposes. This overlaps with corporate data (e-mails, documents, databases, business process histories ...) as well as data from sensors, content published online (images, videos, sounds, texts), e-commerce transactions, exchanges on social networks, data transmitted by connected objects (electronic tags, smart meters, smartphones ...), geolocated data, etc.

The phrase "Big Data" dates from 1997 according to the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2001, Meta Group (now Gartner) analyst Doug Laney described big data based on the "three V" principle:

• the amount of data more and more massive
• the variety of these data that can be raw, unstructured or semi-structured;
• Velocity describes the fact these data are produced, collected and analyzed in real time.

Some companies put in a fourth "V" to the definition for Veracity, which describes the requirement to verify the credibility of the source and the caliber of the content in order to exploit the data.

Big data and data storage

The rise of big data has followed the evolution of storage and data processing systems with the advent of cloud computing and supercomputers. Now, we're speaking about petabytes and zettabytes to designate the volumes that big data represents. In accordance with forecasts by IDC, the amount of data produced worldwide will wait 40 zettabytes in 2020.

Marketing, science, commerce: the big data domains

The exploitation of big data has opened new perspectives in many fields: scientific research, politics, communication, medicine, meteorology, ecology, finance, commerce, etc. As a result of analytical tools and data modeling, researchers, companies, administrations can do trend or predictive analysis, draw profiles, anticipate risks and monitor phenomena in real time ...

For companies focusing on big data solutions, this can be a real eldorado and a long-term trend with a market estimated at tens of billions of dollars.