I’ve seen companies saying they have Big Data because they implemented Hadoop or a data lake and maybe Spark.
That’s just wrong.
Big Data, or more precisely, to be Data Driven, is a state where the data a company produces can be reused, as soon as possible, to optimize itself. And there are many ways to reuse data: all meetings and decisions happen with abundance of data, or recently generated data instantly feeds machine learning algorithms to optimize transactions, just to name a few situations.
To be Driven by Data is part culture and part infrastructure. On the infrastructure side, IT teams still struggle with limited visions about how data should flow pervasively and how access should be granted. They fear about security and performance while they should fear of missing out the data opportunity.
Data Streaming is a breakthrough recent technology that is here to help with more fluent data access. For an agile and effective data architecture, Data Streaming is much more strategic and important than just a bigger data warehouse because it is the component that can unleash your data and finally make it useful.