The so-called Digital Revolution supposed great technological changes in people’s daily lives, the production capacity of companies and in most professional and personal spheres. As a consequence, technology has advanced by leaps and bounds and a huge number of qualified professionals are needed to face the digital challenge .

The massive use of the Internet, mobile devices, the use of digital platforms and, in general, the adoption of a digital world in our habits, have led to the generation of huge amounts of data that present great opportunities and challenges for its management. And that is where the concept of Big Data comes into play .

These huge amounts of large-scale data cannot be treated with conventional software, but Big Data is used to manage, process and store a large amount of information in a reasonable time .

What is Big Data and what is it for?: What is it and how to become an expert in Big Data?

The Big Data is a broad concept that encompasses data, and also services, technologies and infrastructure that have been created to deal with the large volume of data. It allows companies and organizations to address problems and take advantage of opportunities based on the conclusions obtained from working with these massive volumes of data from new sources, mostly digital.

The concept of Big Data, big data, intelligence of massive data or large-scale data, among others, is increasingly used and its volume is increasing every year as a growing and immense volume of data is generated.

With the use of the Internet and the new IoT or Internet of Things devices, millions of data are generated every day that comes from activity on web pages, mobile applications, behavior on platforms, patterns of use of users who use connected devices, etc. .

Do you know the «5 V’s» of Big Data?: What is it and how to become an expert in Big Data?

Volume, variety and speed were the 3 initial premises that perfectly defined Big Data technology. We say that Big Data is a volume of data of greater size, complexity and variety that grows at high speed and comes from new digital sources.

In recent times, the terms of veracity and value have been added to complete the way of understanding Big data.

We can define each of them as:

• Variety: It is one of the main challenges of Big data. It represents the different types and formats in which we obtain data, they can be in plain text, videos, images, databases … All information must be processed in order to proceed with its analysis.

• Volume: This is large amounts of unstructured data of a very diverse origin. It depends on the level of the organization, but we can find hundreds of Tb of data to process. When working with data is a challenge for the organization, we talk about Big data. You cannot define an exact quantity to be considered “Big”.

• Speed: The rate of reception or generation of data is increasing and requires a response in real time.

• Truthfulness: The data must be real and reliable, otherwise they will have no value to be able to get their full potential and make correct decision-making.

• Value: Big data analysis should generate profit. Big data is an important asset in large tech companies, for example, as it allows them to develop new products and work more effectively and efficiently.

Advantages of Big Data for companies: What is it and how to become an expert in Big Data?

At the business level, this data needs to be processed, analyzed and used to squeeze all that information for the benefit of companies . The advantages of using Big Data at a professional level is that it allows you to make better and faster decisions, know the market in depth, build customer loyalty, obtain feedback in real time, make precise segmentations and create more efficient and targeted strategic or marketing plans. to the real profile of our clients and users.

With the use of Big Data we will be able to know in depth the preferences of the users, what they think of our products and services, what needs they have, what is their relationship with the brand, etc.

What does it take to work with Big Data?

In order to unleash the full potential of big data, and any organization that wants to take advantage of the advantages and benefits of using Big Data technology, will need 4 main assets:

• Data:  Thanks to the fact that the generation of data by users occurs increasingly, the efforts of the organization must be oriented to obtain good quality and reliable data.
• Digital and analytical tools:  There is a wide variety of platforms and tools suitable for handling these large volumes of information on the market.

Traditional technologies and tools are not powerful, fast or advanced enough to handle massive amounts of information. For this reason, with the passage of time, new applications and platforms have appeared that have the latest advanced technology for the visualization and analysis of Big data.

Some of the main Big Data tools that we can find today are Spark, NoSQL, Hadoop, Storm, Hive, the R programming language or D3.js as a JS library, among many others.

• Qualified professionals:   This is one of the most fundamental assets, if not the most important. Any organization needs to have the human factor. Therefore, Big Data experts, data scientists and professionals capable of working with these technologies are increasingly in demand in the market and have great job opportunities.
• Digital transformation:  To ensure the success of the use of Big Data, the organization must be 100% data driven, that is, all departments must assume this new technological approach and where data is at the center of everything.

How does Big Data work?

In order to reach the conclusions that are obtained from the use of Big Data and take advantage of all the opportunities that they offer us, we go through a 3-step process:

1. Integration:  In this step, the data is incorporated and processed in such a way that it is available for the company’s analysts to handle.
2. Management:  The optimal storage solution must be chosen for each case. The cloud is an option that is increasingly in demand and is better adapted to new technologies.
3. Analysis:  It is one of the most important phases of the process since the analysis of the data allows it to be used to create models of machine learning, artificial intelligence, build action plans and squeeze all the information that all the data we obtain provides us. In addition, this is how investment in big data pays off.

How to become an expert in Big Data?

As we have mentioned, Big Data experts have a great professional future as they are increasingly necessary in any organization.

You may be thinking about the direction you want to take in your professional career or you want to recycle your profile to focus on the digital world. If this is your case, you should know that the path to becoming an expert in Big Data begins with training.

Taking a Big Data course or specializing through a master’s degree in Big Data will allow you to acquire all the knowledge you will need to manage and master the different Big Data tools.

Big Data, Virtualization and Machine Learning

 Work on Big Data

Taking the step of becoming a Big Data professional is one of the best choices for 2020 as it will allow you to get good job opportunities, gain experience in a sector that is gaining a lot of ground and ensure a professional future with many guarantees, since Big Data is pivoting to new sectors, not just technology.

As a finishing touch to your university education, doing a master in Big Data will allow you to access new jobs, grow in your company or even change sectors. What is it and how to become an expert in Big Data?