International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 100 – No.14, August 2014 22 Leveraging Big Data for Enhanced Business Values Ravi Kumar Module Leader, Persistent System Ltd, Nagpur Rashmi Bhadani Visiting Assistant Professor, Prestige Institute of Management and Research Indore ABSTRACT In today’s age of globalization and internalization, precise and meaningful data plays a fundamental role in making crucial decisions across every strata of business, whether it is associated with human resource or sales or production or marketing or for any other field. For example, Apple, Facebook, Twitters and others know the next emerging trend in the market and transmute its strategies to adapt to the recent trends. All these multi-billionaire giants have the power of analysing the myriad of data flowing in from sundry of sources like social media, market trends, past annals and lot more. They are all accoutred with the most-indispensable tool in current globalized economy, “The BIG DATA." It refers to datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage, and analyse. With the advent of Big Data, the business houses now can capture various trends in the market with minimal cost incurred. It had helped individuals as well as the organization to make proper decisions and increase the base of their operations by targeting the apt customers for the business. Big Data is playing a pivotal role in transfiguring the business decisions. On the other side, there are numerous challenges presented by the ‘Big Data," like security and privacy issues, infrastructure failure, and others. Thus, this paper presents the concept of Big Data, opportunities derived by companies using cases, and challenges related to Big Data. Since, Big Data is in its embryological phase; this paper will provide a snapshot to the scholar for future research in this field. Keywords Big Data, privacy, security, opportunities 1. INTRODUCTION Ubiquitous Data Torrent: Data, Data Everywhere. For years long, large amount of data is needed for generating valuable business insights. Earlier, the census method was used to record data that were related to crop yields. Later, analysis of these collected data was done for improving the effectiveness of society. Not only limited to this, the foundational theories in calculus, statistics, and probability fostered new tools that were used by scientist to predict movements of stars and suns, predicting rates of various crimes, event of suicides, and others. One such important development was related to the field of collection and analysis of data was done by Dr John in 1800’s. Dr John has used modern tool of data analysis to map the cholera clusters across London and thus laid the foundation of the germ theory. In today’s world of technological revolution and networking, data has been woven in our life as threads are woven in fabrics. This huge amount of data generation is from diverse sources, like mainframe, mobile devices, interaction between client and server, social networking, and others. Instead of discussing the entire advent of data conglomeration and multifarious data growth, focus can be concentrated on a time frame of just 60 seconds for consideration. For every 60 seconds, in this globalized and digitized world, the volume, velocity and variety of social data and mobile data can be gauged from the following statistics [1]:  694,445 queries are served by Google search engine.  More than 6,600 images are uploaded on website named Flickr.  More than 600 videos that account for more than twenty-five hours contents are uploaded on the YouTube.  More than 168,000,000 electronic mails are sent on the network.  Creation of 320 fresh accounts on Twitter.  98,000 new tweets on Twitter, a social networking websites.  Downloading of iPhone application around 13,000 times.  695,000 updates of status, 510,040 comments, and wall posts comprising of 79,364 postings on Facebook, and others. Additionally, CISCO estimates the growth of annual data traffic on the network to 7.7 zettabytes in 2017 [2]. In a nutshell compendium, the today's data is huge (Volume), multi-structured (Variety) and fast Moving (Velocity). This further strengthens the fact that an insight into data will help not only in staying competitive, but also reaching the right customer base, at right time, for the right business. Further, traditional data systems are unable to handle the data or analytical needs of the present era. Primary reason can be contributed to the amalgamation of structured and unstructured data and the time required for retrieving the desired information for the substantial data. Present data stack is stringent to the changes required for the meticulous analysis of data for obtaining a useful insight having economic value. These scenarios provided the necessary impetus and impelled the creation of a new data stack. 2. BIG DATA CONCEPT The new data pile consisting of Big Data is the panacea for overcoming all the hurdles of traditional data sets. Big Data refers to datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze. This definition is intentionally subjective and incorporates a moving definition of how big a dataset needs to