By Dr. Deanne Larson
Faculty Member, Information Technology at American Public University               

The consistent evolution of technology has produced the need for new IT skills over the last two decades. Couple this with the explosion of data, and it shouldn’t be surprising to see a demand for IT resources that support business analytics and the processing of what is known as Big Data.

Big Data categorizes extremely large data sets produced by website traffic, social media, machine-to-machine communications, equipment sensors, and documents; this is not an exhaustive list; but you get the picture. Why is this data any different from data captured by traditional organizational information systems? The volume, variety, and velocity of the data distinguishes Big Data from other data sets. Unstructured data, level of detail, and overall amount generated challenges what we know about data management.