Understanding the Close Relationship Between the IoT and Big Data
- by 7wData
It is sometimes necessary to talk about the big picture before that picture becomes entirely clear, even though those discussions tend to be conceptual and vague.
Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) have been separate to date – at least in the public eye – and each covers a tremendous amount of territory. The fact is, however, that they have a deep and symbiotic relationship: The mountain of data that the IoT produces would be useless without the analytic power of Big Data. Conversely, without the IoT, Big Data would not have the raw materials from which to fashion solutions that are expected of it.
The two meet somewhere in the middle.
“The intersection is where there is a need to process, transform, and analyze large sets of data on a high frequency,” wrote Wayne Adams, the senior technologist in the Corporate CTO Office of EMC Corporation in response to emailed questions.
The key will be finding the right strategy for harnessing the power of these two areas in a mutually beneficial way.
“There are many approaches,” wrote Ray Wang, the founder and principal analyst of Constellation Research, in response to emailed questions. “The question with the IoT is really what data you want to capture via sensors. From there, you have to figure out how to move data to information, information to insight, insight to actions so that you can augment decisions.”
A lot of money and competitive issues between companies hang in the balance. GE has just introduced Predix, a cloud-based Big Data platform aimed at industrial applications. It will rely on the IoT for much of the data it processes. “From our perspective, the industrial IoT and Big Data are inextricably linked and bound together, by Technology and economics,” indicated Vince Campisi, GE Digital’s CIO for Software and Services Technology. “There’s no law saying the IoT and Big Data must be joined at the hip, but it makes sense to see them as natural partners because you can’t operate complex machines or devices efficiently without predictive analytics and you need Big Data for the analytics.”
Arnab Chakraborty, the managing director of Accenture Analytics and Global Analytics, agreed that the “exponential increase in data” generated by the IoT makes Big Data necessary. “This is where IoT intersects wonderfully with Big Data -- Big Data capacity is, in essence, a prerequisite to tapping into the Internet of Things,” Chakraborty wrote in response to emailed questions.
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