To clarify the concepts, while Big Data deals with content, cloud computing plays the role of infrastructure. The two technologies go hand-in-hand to yield excellent results. Considering the voluminous and sensitive nature of data sets, it’s crucial to keep it in a secure and orderly environment- that’s where the Cloud comes in!

As the Cloud is being adopted by enterprises large and small, these businesses are also beginning to leverage Big Data with marked success. The main market driver for the surge in big data adoption is the rise of the Internet of Things and the expansion of infrastructure-as-a-service in the global market. Cloud computing infrastructure gives you the capacity to easily process big data on your laptops and computer systems. Let’s dive into precisely how Big Data and cloud computing work together and what benefits they offer businesses globally.

The Relationship between Big Data and Cloud Computing 

More often than not both Big Data and cloud computing are bundled together and to understand why you’d need a basic understanding of these technologies.

Put simply, big data can be defined as large volumes of either structured or unstructured data, for instance, terabytes, petabyte or even higher volumes. Because of its extremely enormous volume, traditional software techniques and databases lack the capacity to process the data. A straightforward definition of cloud computing is that it involves storing and accessing data, files, and programs on the Internet, rather than your personal hard drive.

Using hardware virtualization, cloud computing offers the ability to store massive amounts of data through the means of scalability, availability and fault tolerance.  This in turn renders big data scalable, fault-tolerant and available thanks to cloud computing.

Remarks

The combination of these two fundamental technologies gives businesses that have brilliant ideas but limited resources, a strong possibility at ever-increasing success. The technologies also give businesses the means to leverage the data that they have previously captured but in the past had no way of analyzing.

Businesses are shifting office productivity applications for instance, word processors to the cloud to reduce expenses on individual licensing of software. Data center managers consider the cloud to be a means to lower server acquisition and support costs, allowing them to concentrate more on actual business challenges. 

Infrastructure as a Cloud Service

Infrastructure could involve a range of things, such as server hardware and software, networking and storage. By transferring the administration and support of servers to the cloud, you can cut costs for the company and make the servers accessible anywhere as long as there is an Internet connection. Vendors who offer cloud computing solutions build virtual servers on large hardware platforms to enable them to scale up or down swiftly and accommodate a high number of customers on a single piece of server hardware. This accomplishes the economies of scale that are beyond the reach of the typical data center, no matter if the data center was highly virtualized in the first place. This is particularly helpful for businesses that have erratic loads on their computing infrastructures. 

The Future of Cloud Computing

Just like the Internet, cloud computing is here for the long haul. The anytime, anyplace computing services that it delivers will keep growing. ISaaS or Infrastructure security as a service is already being employed to enable the cloud vendor to manage all authentications to the customers’ network.

This offers customers a level of cushioning from entry to the network directly from the Internet, which is normally the cause of a host of issues faced by corporate networks. As vendors go on competing with each other they will keep on developing new service models and cloud computing solutions will become as universal as the Internet.