The Right Time to Manage and Analyze Big Data in the Cloud

IT has been increasingly pushed by executive leadership to support decision making by analyzing big data in vast amounts, encompassing disparate sources and various formats. Given the low cost of online storage, keeping the data is not necessarily a problem, but doing something useful with large amounts of data can be daunting with in-house computing resources. Google has moved to address this need by combining a rich set of analytical tools with a cloud environment that can be applied flexibly to manage the data lakes that increasingly characterize business intelligence.As Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai noted, computing is, in fact, addressing petabyte-scale problems. Google demonstrated several simple data sorts that involved petabyte-sized files during his presentation. Increasingly, such computing loads will be commonplace and the companies that can successfully manage big data applications will have a competitive advantage in the marketplace.