ITU members have approved the first ITU standard on Big Data. The standard details the requirements, capabilities and use cases of cloud-based Big Data as well a high-level ‘system context’ view and its relationships with other entities.
The Big Data paradigm provides an effective, scalable solution to deal with growing volumes of data and uncover patterns or other information capable of making data manageable and profitable.
Advances in information and communication technology (ICT) are enabling masses of data to be generated, transmitted and stored, and this explosive growth is increasing in pace. Datasets have become so large and complex, and are generated so fast, that traditional approaches to data processing are proving inadequate. Achieving efficient analysis of data within required timeframes is a significant challenge, one that industry will address using technologies in the field of Big Data.
The new standard, Recommendation ITU-T Y.3600 “Big data – cloud computing based requirements and capabilities”, was developed by ITU-T’s expert group responsible for future networks, cloud computing and network aspects of mobile communications, ITU-T Study Group 13.
“New frontiers in ICT innovation are coming within reach thanks to advances in data collection and analysis,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao. “The ICT industry will welcome these advances and ensure that their benefits can be achieved on a global scale.”
“This new ITU standard provides internationally agreed fundamentals of cloud-based Big Data,” said Chaesub Lee, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Bureau. “It will build cohesion in the terminology used to describe cloud-based Big Data and offer a common basis for the development of Big Data services and supporting technical standards.”
ITU-T Y.3600 describes the meaning of Big Data and the characteristics of the Big Data ecosystem from a standardization perspective. The standard outlines how cloud computing systems can be leveraged to provide Big Data services, assisting industry in the management of large datasets incapable of being transferred and analysed using traditional data-management technologies.
In addition to its description of the fundamentals of cloud-based Big Data, ITU-T Y.3600 provides definitions of Big Data and Big Data as a Service (BDaaS):
Big Data is a paradigm for enabling the collection, storage, management, analysis and visualization, potentially under real-time constraints, of extensive datasets with heterogeneous characteristics.
BDaaS is a cloud service category in which the capabilities provided to the cloud service customer are the ability to collect, store, analyse, visualize and manage data using Big Data technologies.
