The big challenge around Big Data is speed.
That is the view of Steve Strickland-Wright, CTO of Manchester-based software house Cake Solutions .
Every day, 2.5 billion gigabytes of data are created – and Strickland-Wright said the figure was only going to get bigger.
Speaking at a BusinessCloud Big Data conference at the International Festival for Business in Liverpool, he said: “When you’re generating significant volumes of data and you want to analyse that in real-time or near-real-time, that’s more complex and in my opinion the biggest challenge.
“We need to accept that data is big and getting bigger.
“When instant insight is a requirement then you need to develop reactive applications capable of meeting that requirement.”
He said the Internet of Things would change the landscape.
“The industrial Internet of Things is another level. This is huge and the opportunities are almost endless,” he added.
“I read something the other day, it was something like this: when people looked at plastic in the 1940s, do you think they knew the extent of its application and the way it would change the world?
“IoT is the same.”
Strickland-Wright told a BusinessCloud IoT roundtable that using data to review the performance of products is key for business.
“Only now are people – whether they are in the boardroom of Tesla or Google or Samsung or a start-up – are looking at that data and saying ‘wow – there is a big opportunity here to understand more about their products when they are released into the wild’.
“The need to understand the value of that data and invest in the resources needed to draw the insights out which will help make them better companies that serve themselves and others.”
He also said the efforts of private companies could help with advising the nation on healthy lifestyles.