Big Data a Bane of Small Businesses

December 8, 2011

Is anyone really surprised? “Big Data Strains Small-Business Bandwidth,” announces InfoWorld. Apparently this is news to some folks. Since Thanksgiving, a time to celebrate unemployed English majors and failed azure chip search consultants, I have been involved is four separate meetings about big data. To be fair, each of these meetings talked about the perception of big data, not actually whipping around a couple of copies of the Internet or a year’s worth of Twitter and Facebook gold ore.

InfoWorld is pretty excited about big data. We learned from the write up that some folks thought storage would be the biggest hurdle small businesses would face when wrangling large amounts of data. Not so, reports writer Matt Prigge. The article asserts:

Storage vendors seem to be doing a great job staying on top of the demand for ever larger data densities and software to allow you to make more efficient use of it (think dedupe and intelligent thin provisioning). But for the most part, you can’t say the same about the telcos and ISPs providing the wide area networks we’re using to acquire and share that data.

The problem is worst in rural areas, where expensive solutions like DS3, SONET, ATM, and Metro-Ethernet are simply not available. Many businesses turn to the cloud, but that won’t work for companies with certain conditions, like highly graphical work. Besides, you have to be very confident in your Internet service provider to rely on hosting services. The solution? Some companies just have to pack up and move (back) to the big city.

Yes, everything works well when there is unlimited bandwidth, unlimited technical resources, and Talking about big data is different from processing in an operational unlimited infrastructure. The real world is different from the Ivory Tower, however. Three observations:mode real time flows of content from social systems, mobile phone usage reports, etc. But talk is cheap and easy. Big data is neither.

Big data usually skips over the issue of latency. There are different definitions of real time in indexing big data. Defining terms is a useful first step.
Most of the big data chatter is marketing. You, gentle reader, should know what marketing means: sizzle, not sirloin.

Cynthia Murrell, December 8, 2011

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.