One thing in life that’s certain is that things change. Over the last few decades, the world has been changing at a much faster clip, thanks in large part to the internet. The high-speed data transfer the Internet facilitates, known as “high velocity, high variety and high volume,” leads to the creation of large amounts of data, exponentially more than most of us could have imagined just a few years ago. Few people were familiar with the term “exabyte” five to 10 years ago, and even fewer knew what it meant (for what it’s worth, an exabyte is equal to a million terabytes). Consider this: a study found that from the beginning of time until 2003, the world had generated a total of approximately two exabytes of data. Ten years later, we were generating five exabytes of data – per day. And we’re generating even more than that today, so much that the term “big data” hardly seems sufficient to describe this phenomenon.
So where is all this data coming from? Today, a lot of it comes from things. Many of the devices we all use on a daily basis are connected to the Internet. The most obvious are computers, smartphones and tablets, but there are others as well. Maybe you’ve received an email alert that a water-sensing alarm in your basement was tripped. Or perhaps you’ve heard about “smart” refrigerators that let you know when you’re running low on milk and automatically add it to your digital shopping list. These are just two examples of the growing number of objects in our homes, businesses and all around us that are equipped with integrated sensors and an IP address to enable them to communicate. Technologies such as GPS and RFID help to connect these objects in an expanding information network known as the Internet of Things.