40 Mind-Boggling Facts about Big Data

Big Data is big Bucks, a 21^st century gold rush and to extend the metaphor, big data analytics is the modern-day equivalent of panning for gold.

Big Data describes the collection of data sets so magnanimous in volume and complexity that it’s difficult to capture, process, store, search and analyze it using conventional methods. Its uses are shaping the world around us, offering more qualitative insights into our everyday lives.

While there are too many seminars and conferences about big data, held at different parts of the globe, there are many facts about this new age technology that are still unknown. Listing below some of these Mind-Boggling Facts and Stats:

1. Data Sizes:

Bit – 1/8 of a Letter

Nibble – ½ of a Letter

Byte – 1Letter

Megabyte – 1,024 kilobytes – 1 Book

Gigabyte – 1,024 Megabytes – 1600 books

Terabyte – 1,024 Gigabytes – 1,600,000 books

Petabytes – 1,024 Terabytes – 160,000,000 books

Exabyte – 1,024 Petabytes – 1,600,000,000,000 books

*1 Exabyte is equivalent to about 3000 times the entire content of the Library of Congress. Or we can also say it is 10,000 miles short of reaching the moon.

2. Every day we create 2.5 Quintillion bytes of Data. This data could fill 10 million Blu-ray discs, height of which stacked would measure the height of 4 Eiffel Towers on top of one another.

This is expected to continue growing at a significant rate with mobile devices accounting for much of this data.

3. Google’s Eric Schmidt claims that now we create as much information in every two days as compared to what we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.

4. Some experts say that, over 90% of the world’s data today has been created in the last 2 years than in the entire previous history of the human race.

5. Global internet traffic in 2013 was approximately 51 Billion Gigabytes. Global Internet Population grew 14.3% between 2011 and 2013

6. Presently, 3 billion people have access to the internet, this is equal to the world’s population in the year 1960.

7. Total amount of data being captured and stored by industry doubles every 1.2 years.

• Every minute there are:
• 300 hours of footage uploaded to YouTube
• 347,222 tweets
• 1,736,111 Instagram Posts
• 694 Uber rides by passengers
• 284,722 snaps share on Snapchat
• 4,166,667 Facebook Users like posts
• 51,000 Apps Download by APPLE Users

9. Google alone processes on average over 40 thousand queries per second, making it over 3.5 billion in a single day.
10. Every hour, enough information is consumed by internet traffic to fill 7 million DVDs. Side by side they’d scale Mount Everest 95 times.

11. Picture every book in every library, school, home, and company in the entire world – it’s a lot of books. Yet all those books combined, make up a trivial 6 percent of the sum total of all human data. In 2007 it was estimated that 94% of all data was stored in digital format.

12. Experts predict more than 40 Zettabytes of digital data to be in existence by 2020. 4 years ago, the entire world wide web was estimated to contain approximately 500 Exabyte – which is 5 billion gigabytes -half of 1 Zettabyte. 40 Zettabytes is 400 billion gigabytes.

13. The number of Bits of information stored in the digital universe is thought to have exceeded the number of stars in the physical universe back in 2007.

14. By 2020, we will have over 1 billion smartphone users globally. And at least a third of all data will pass through the cloud.

15. Within five years there will be over 50 billion connected smart devices in the world, all develop to collect, analyze and share data.

16. 12 million RFID tags- used to capture data and track movement of objects in the physical world – have been sold since 2011. By 2021, it is estimated that their number will have risen to 209 billion as the Internet of Things takes off.

17. Distributed computing (performing computing tasks using a network of computers in the cloud) is very real. Google uses it every day to involve about 1,000 computers in answering a single search query, which takes no more than 0.2 second to complete.

18. The Hadoop (open source software for distributed computing) market is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate 58% surpassing $1billion by 2020.

19. Big Data has been used to predict crimes before they happen – a “predictive policing” trail in California was able to identify areas where crime will occur three times more accurately than existing methods of forecasting.

20. By better integrating big data analytics into the healthcare, the industry could save $300 bn a year – that’s the equivalent of reducing the healthcare costs of every man, woman and child by $1,000 a year.

21. The White House has already invested more than $200 million in Big Data projects.

22. Bad Data or Poor Data Quality costs US business $600 billion annually.

23. 73% of organizations have already invested or planned to invest in big data by 2016.

24. 570 new websites spring into existence every minute of every day.

25. Today’s data centres occupy an area of land equal in size to almost 6,000 Football fields.

26. 9 million IT jobs will be created to handle the upcoming big data projects. Each of these jobs will be supported by three additional jobs. This leads to the generation of total 6 million new jobs.

27. According to Gartner Big data will drive $232 billion in spending through 2016.

28. Data collection volume increased by 400% in 2012, from an average of 10 collection events per page to 50.

29. 70% of data is created by individuals – but enterprises are responsible for storing and managing 80% of it.

30. By 2020, IT departments will be looking after 10x more servers, 50x more data and 75x more files.

31. Up to 80% of the 247 billion email messages sent each day are spam.

32. $214 – average cost per customer compromised when a data breach occurs.

33. $326 billion – Projected volume of e-commerce transactions in 2016.

34. 6 – average number of different sources customers use throughout the purchase when considering new technology.

35. 85% Digital marketers engage with social media while working.

36. 190,000 vacant positions in jobs involving ‘Big Data’

37. 120% – Data growth rate of Media Sectors and Financial Services every year.

38. Stacking a pile of CD-ROMs on top of one another until you’d reached the current global storage capacity for digital information would stretch 80,000 km beyond the moon.

39. At the moment, less than 5% of all data is ever analyzed and used, just imagine the potential here.

40. People wishing each other Happy New Year drove a 500% surge in smartphone data within just one year, according to UK whose customers used a whopping 80Terabytes on the 31^st December 2011, compared to just 14TBs on the same day in 2010.