Big Data using Cloud Computing - Opportunities for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Big Data has been listed as one of the current and future research frontiers by Gartner. Large-sized companies are already investing on and leveraging big data. Small-sized and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can also leverage big data to gain a strategic competitive advantage but are often limited by the lack of adequate financial resources to invest on the technology and manpower. Several big data challenges still exist especially in computer architecture that is CPU-heavy but I/O poor. Cloud computing eliminates the need to maintain expensive computing hardware and software. Cloud computing resources and techniques can be leveraged to address the traditional problems associated with fault tolerance and low performance causing bottlenecks to using big data. SMEs can take advantage of cloud computing techniques to avail the advantages of big data without significant investments in technology and manpower. This paper explores the current trends in the area of big data using cloud resources and how SMEs can take advantage of these technological trends. The results of this study will benefit SMEs in identifying and exploring possible opportunities and also understanding the challenges in leveraging big data.