Chasing Clouds – How Data Fundamentally Changes when it Evaporates

This is Part 4 of a 5-part series devoted to exploring the concept of Big Data to determine what makes it different from other hyped data “revolutions” of the past.

In its molecular form, water consists of two hydrogen atoms bonded to a single oxygen atom.  At ambient temperatures, water molecules bond together to form a tasteless, odorless liquid that covers 70 percent of the planet.  When a water molecule gathers a certain amount of energy, the tight bonds that hold it to other water molecules begin to break and the molecule escapes to form vapor, which rises into the atmosphere and forms clouds.

Water and data aren’t so different.  Although both retain intrinsic characteristics as they ascend into the clouds, they also take on different attributes.  In its gaseous state, water possesses more energy and less structure than in a liquid state.

Similarly, data takes on different trappings when it enters the cloud.  To better illustrate the point, let’s consider a simple organizational use case involving file sharing.

Let’s say a company was launching a new product and the marketing department wanted to share a slick with the sales department.  Pre-cloud, the marketing department would typically place the slick on the company intranet before sending around a departmental e-mail, notifying the sales department of its existence.  The sales team would access the document via the intranet, possibly save a version of the slick to their local machine and share it with a handful of prospects via e-mail.  Throughout the entire process, a negligible amount of quantifiable data would have been generated.

In a cloud-enabled world, the use case plays out quite differently.  By its very nature, the cloud is more capable of facilitating interaction, which in turn leads to data production.  An innovative marketing department that hosts the slick in the cloud, makes it not only available to their own sales department but also to a host of other important stakeholders  (e.g. prospects, investors, analysts, etc.).  What’s more, the slick can also be made available to search engines, which makes the slick potentially available to the rest of the connected world.  In the cloud, the innovative marketing department can also facilitate sharing, elicit feedback and more.  Each distinction creates the potential for both user interaction and data production.

Perhaps the greatest impact to data production is felt on the level of the individual.

In a pre-cloud environment, individuals host assets like photos, documents and contacts on their desktops, where they often sit lifeless and dormant.  The cloud breathes life into these objects: images that move to Facebook and Flickr become shared and tagged by others; documents that move onto Google Documents can be indexed and modified by others; contacts that are imported into LinkedIn become associated with living, breathing individuals.

Like water, data has more energy when it’s in the cloud.

This leads us to our third conclusion about Big Data: As media migrates from the desktop into the cloud, it transforms from being a largely dormant object into a catalyst for user interaction and in the process, incrementally increases the overall volume of quantifiable data.