Digital data is now everywhere—in every sector, in every economy, in every organization, and user of digital technology. While this topic might once have concerned only a few data geeks, big data is now relevant to leaders across every sector, and consumers of products and services stand to benefit from its application. The ability to store, aggregate, and combine data and then use the results to perform deep analyses has become ever more accessible as trends such as Moore’s Law in computing, its equivalent in digital storage, and cloud computing continue to lower costs and other technical barriers.

The amount of data in our world has been exploding. Different companies capture trillions of bytes of information about their customers, suppliers, and operations, and millions of networked sensors are being embedded in the physical world in devices such as mobile phones and automobiles. We are seeing an increase in data size over the last decade. It is estimated that by 2025, there will be more than 150 zettabytes of data collected worldwide. This collected big data is extremely helpful to organizations who want to analyze it and get insights from it. Before organizations can extract insights from the data, they need to collect it first. As we know, data is massive and exists in various forms. In this blog post, we will explore the sources of Big Data and its types.

Main Sources of Big Data

Although Big data originates from multiple sources, the most common ones are below.

• Climate information data collected from IOT (Internet of Things) based Sensors
• Digital Pictures (Pinterest)
• Digital Audio (Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon Music)
• Digital videos (Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney)
• Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, WhatsApp)
• Retail Stores and E-Commerce Websites (Amazon, Target, Walmart, Costco, Etsy, Wayfair)
• Financial transaction records (Invoices, E-receipts)
• Cell phone GPS (Global Positioning System) signals data
• Cell and Towers data collected by a communications company (Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T)
• Refinery Sensors and Seismic exploration data collected by oil and gas companies
• Data from power plants and distribution systems by electric power utilities
• User-generated data from prospective customers
• Social security numbers
• Credit card numbers (Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express)
• Data on patterns of usage and buying habits in e-commerce websites
• Internet cookies
• Healthcare Data (Claim, Medicare, Medical Records)
• Government Agencies Data

With cloud computing and the socialization of the Internet, unstructured data petabytes of data are created online daily and much of this information has an intrinsic business value if it can be captured and analyzed.

Categories of Sources of Big Data

Multimedia and individuals with smartphones and social network sites will continue to fuel exponential growth. Big data is large pools of data that can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed and is now part of every sector and function of the global economy. Like other essential factors of production such as hard assets and human capital, it is increasingly the case that much of modern economic activity, innovation, and growth couldn’t take place without data.

All of these sources of data can be categorized into three main sections.

• Machines
• People
• Organizations

Conclusion

In this blog post, we learned about how Apache Hadoop data gets generated and its sources.

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