The challenges and promise of big data are front and center for CIOs and other business leaders. The initial applications that have leveraged big data have provided organizations with significant returns and given a glimpse into the power of big data and how it can be used to disrupt their competitive landscape.
IBM today rolled out a tool it says can cull massive terabytes of data, including email -- to help customers detect external attacks aimed at stealing sensitive information or insider threats that might reveal corporate secrets.
Two public cloud service providers have rolled out hosted versions of Hadoop clusters, including SkyTap announcing a partnership with Hadoop distributor Cloudera, and Joyent teaming with HortonWorks on a cloud-based Hadoop service that's available today.
Twitter proved beneficial for market acceptance of big data and the vendors who provide the service in 2012, according to new research from analyst firm Ovum.
Average salaries for tech pros climbed 5.3% to $85,619 last year, up from $81,327 in 2011. It's the largest salary jump in more than a decade, according to career site Dice.
"Big data" is the buzzword of the day, and learning to manage it and extract value from it is top of mind for executives across industries. A contributing factor to the surge in big data is a shift in prevailing corporate data management philosophies.
For some time Microsoft didn't offer a solution for processing big data in cloud environments. SQL Server is good for storage, but its ability to analyze terabytes of data is limited. Hadoop, which was designed for this purpose, is written in Java and was not available to .Net developers. So, Microsoft launched the Hadoop on Windows Azure service to make it possible to distribute the load and speed up big data computations.
The promise of big data is enormous, but it can also become an albatross around your neck if you don't make security of both your data and your infrastructure a key part of your big data project from the beginning. Here are some steps you can take to avoid big data pitfalls.
Rackspace says it is now offering customers the ability to create customized virtual networks in a public cloud, using software defined networking-like capabilities.
Elasticity — the ability to ramp up or down computing resources depending on need — is one of the key benefits of cloud computing. Not being shackled to their own, in-house hardware means organisations can dial up the amount of resources they need to crunch big data sets, run their Web presence during spikes and troughs in demand and process periodic jobs without needing the internal resources necessary to cope with only peak demand.
Microsoft, with the help of partner Hortonworks, brings Hadoop to Windows and stakes its claim as a vendor of big data technologies with new cloud-based and on-premises offerings.
Every enterprise software vendor will tell you how hot and in-demand their products are, but the notion rings fairly true with respect to BI (business intelligence) and advanced analytics. The products just kept selling throughout the global recession, as companies looked to gain insights into their business and subsequently, more efficiency as well as new ideas.
Last month I made some predictions for the Top 10 trends that will affect your work life in 2012. Now that the New Year's celebrations are behind us, it's a good time to reflect on what your Top 10 New Year's resolutions might be (beyond losing 10 pounds or learning to hang glide). My humble suggestions for you are:
LexisNexis is planning to release its internally developed supercomputing platform as open source, providing developers with an alternative to the Hadoop framework for large-scale data processing, the company said Wednesday.
Yahoo is discontinuing its distribution of the Hadoop platform and will instead focus on Apache Hadoop, the Hadoop Team at Yahoo said this week.