Big data refers to storage of bulk data whereas cloud computing deals with storage and computing. Big data in computing environment can be managed by using distributed storage. Traditional storage method is not sufficient for storing big data. Hence, cloud evolved to provide the solution. The expansion of big data storage is done by cloud through virtual machines and makes big data more accessible. Initially, big data and cloud are used in various ways. Many investors decided to join the two techniques to make a maximum business outcome. Both the technologies aimed to reduce the investment cost and increase the income of the organizations. Microsoft, Google, amazon are successful in using big data in cloud platform. The world runs online. People surf data and leave data online. For example: people use internet in various ways like social media such as Facebook, twitter etc., for ecommerce websites like flipkart, amazon, etc, to get any valuable information they can use Google search engine and so on and leave data online. A new survey found that 42 percent of Americans use the internet several times a day. Companies gather all this data and utilize accordingly to provide better products to satisfy customer requirements and increase their business turn over (Singh and Reddy, 2014). The grouping of these two techniques led to the drastic changes and improvements. It gave huge advantage to analysts and changed the decision-making process for companies, and their outcome is improved.
Cloud technology is a fast-growing field as it offers services to the consumers on a pay-as-you-go model. Instead of storing a data in personal computer or local servers the data is stored in cloud which is easy to manage and provide security. Cloud offers the features such as pay as you-go model, storing, processing, etc. Another feature is that cloud supports large network access in which user from any location can access and upload information to the cloud using their devices. These capabilities are accessible over the network. Availability of the cloud makes it extensible based on requirements. Based on user necessities extra cloud storage (small amount) is provided for their usage. The most important feature of any cloud platform is security. It is one of the best features of cloud platform. The data is safeguarded even if one of the server goes down because cloud creates snapshot of data that is stored. The data that is stored in cloud is neither hacked nor exploited by the intruder, because data is stored within the storage devices with high security. Another feature in cloud is it support data analytics. Cloud offers three primary service models which consist of Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Platform as a Service uses public, private and hybrid clouds. PaaS does not include hosting, but it provides open source software. The Cloud contributor provide resources like object storage, runtime, queuing, databases, etc. Customers are able to develop, run and manage applications by using this platform. Ex: Google App Engine, Herokus, etc. SaaS is known as on-demand software or web-based software or hosted software. This service provides all the necessary settings and infrastructure in place. There are two types of SaaS that is, Vertical SaaS and Horizontal SaaS. Ex: Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM). IaaS is high-level APIs and is provided through the internet. It offers resources such as virtual-machine, disk-image library, IP addresses and virtual local area networks. This service provider provides whole structure along with the related tasks such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
The benefit of using cloud platform is that user need not have to develop the infrastructure from the scratch for storage. Apart from this if companies needs to do some analysis, they can create the virtual copies for analytics. Analytics speed up the process and helps in achieving goals. Cloud simplifies the connectivity within an organization which gives employee access to relevant analytics. The recovery solutions and backups are also implemented within cloud. Agility is yet another advantage because storing and managing data in database by using traditional method is becoming outmoded. Installing a server and setting up new structure will take few weeks. Therefore, this can be compensated by using cloud instead of storing information by using traditional method. Pliability is that storage space of cloud platform is increasing accordingly with growing data. Once the organizations find a pattern from obtained information then, based on their requirements the storage space can be increased or reduced to accommodate the data. As per the survey of new vantage partners, the enterprises focus on advanced techniques to drive the innovative ideas. To give a better competition spirit enterprise successfully implement techniques that can keep away from their competitors. Even though organizations are boosting up the systems, all the data may not be fitted into a single system. This is where cloud platform is used. There are various types of cloud analytics such as private, public and hybrid. Private cloud is a cloud that is dedicated to a single organization. This cloud can be accessed by only one company. The highest priority is given to security and data privacy. Public cloud is available to the public. IT systems will not share the data (Sharma and Navdeti, 2014). This reduces cost and burden on companies. Hybrid cloud results in grouping of both private and public clouds. The crucial data is placed in a private cloud and non-sensitive data that can be accessed by public is placed in public cloud.