5 Most Common Myths Of Big Data

When something new appears and the ways of its application are not clear yet, there always is a mix of hype and speculations not backed up by solid proofs. Speaking of Big Data this includes the statements like:

1. Everyone succeeds with Big Data;
2. Big Data have to be really big;
3. Big Data is a crystal globe of a soothsayer;
4. Big Data costs a fortune;
5. Big Data is a concern of IT-related businesses only.

Below we will explain what each of these myths is based upon, what are the main reasons for such misbeliefs and what’s really going on —  https://itsvit.com/blog/news/demystified-5-myths-big-data/

The Ten IT industry rules that will never get old

Nowadays IT industry is full of youngsters with flashing eyes that speak of Agile soft development, DevOps workflows, artificial intelligence, cyber security, immutable infrastructure, Big Data analytics, machine learning models and other buzzwords.

However, if modern programmers want to deliver superb products and succeed, they have to know at least some of the well-tried practices.These 10 listed IT rules remain unchanged, though they have evolved together with the industry:

1. Open-source products are as good as proprietary;
2. Keep the hardware safe to ensure the security of the software;
3. The secure product is more important than a secure workplace;
4. Test often, test a lot, test in the cloud;
5. There should be a strict control of production environment updates;
6. Be Agile, iterate and interact with the team and the customer;
7. The team is the main asset of any business;
8. Integral software ecosystems are superior to disparate islands with automated updates along the links;
9. IT department should suggest and discuss, not silently follow orders;
10. IT team is the main driver of change throughout the whole business.

Let’s just talk this through, point by point → https://itsvit.com/blog/modern-face-of-10-old-school-it-rules/

The Most Awesome Blockchain Projects Of The Last Year

The interest in blockchain is steaming and the hype train does not show any sign of slowing down. However, as Bitcoin becomes mostly a toy for the rich investors, much of the small- and mid-size blockchain projects are coming on the stage and become a gold mine for all the experienced and aware market players.

Here’s the list of Blockchain projects that gained significant traction in the last year. These are divided into following categories:

1. Currencies (including the ones with emphasis on privacy)
2. Developer tools (smart contracts, scaling, oracles, security, compliance, etc.)
3. Fintech (trading, insurance, lending, investment management, etc.)
4. Security (governance, communication, identity protection, etc.)
5. Value exchange (content monetization, file storage, mesh networking, etc.)
6. Shared data (IoT, logistics, content curation, reputation management, etc.)
7. Authenticity (data values, ticketing systems, etc.)

Follow the link to get read the list → https://itsvit.com/blog/amazing-blockchain-projects-launched-2017/

The ways how blockchain can help fight the climate change

Have you heard about the usage of swarm intelligence, the collective behavior, in the fight against climate change? Well, the blockchain technology can make a significant contribution to its improvement!

Learn about 5 ways the business can follow in order to maximize its profits while helping to solve ecological issues:

1. The recycling efficiency;
2. The food supply chains transparency;
3. The energy grid performance;
4. The environmental treaties compliance;
5. The charity expenditures.

We live at the beginning of a new millennium, and relying on old and trusted ways just doesn’t work anymore → https://itsvit.com/blog/5-ways-the-blockchain-can-help-fight-climate-change/

Big Data Misuse Can be Destructive for Businesses

The right use of the Big Data analytics and machine learning helps to secure the position on the market, increase customer satisfaction and ROI. Quite opposite, the misuse of these technologies will have disastrous results.

80% of enterprise C-suite managers acknowledge using Big Data analytics helps them find new profit opportunities. Moreover, 50% of respondents said that such approach helps increase the revenues and 50% assure this lowers the costs. At the same time, 42% of executives stated that misuse of Big Data impaired their revenues and 39% said this negatively influenced their decision-making.

Let’s take a closer look at the cases when Big Data analytics misuse brought some negative consequences for the businesses. We listed them below.

Read more: https://itsvit.com/blog/big-data-misuse-can-break-your-business/

A Brief Explanation of How Blockchain Technology Works

The blockchain technology is in the phase of early adoption but it’s already influencing multiple industries. Projects in banking, Big Data analytics, energy industry, real estate are known all over the world, yet the principles of the technology are still ‘terra incognita’ for many people — they simply don’t know how it works.

Bitcoin, the oldest of cryptocurrencies, is nearly a decade old. Multiple startups raise funding through ICOs, selling blockchain-based tokens instead of traditional equity shares. At the same time, such terms like “peer-to-peer trading”, “trustless agreement”, “distributed ledger”, or “double spending” are making somewhat confusing.

Let’s remedy that straight away. Here’s a brief explanation of  how blockchain technology works in a way even a grandma will get — https://itsvit.com/blog/blockchain-technology-explained-grandma/

The Reasons to Use the Apache Cassandra Database

1. Forget about hard tasks — Building a centralized storage for logs and metrics and retrieving historical information from this storage is a task Cassandra deals with utmost ease.
2. It’s easy to learn — Cassandra Query Language (CQL) is basically the same SQL but stripped of the more advanced features.
3. Quick writing and reading — hey, it was developed for Facebook, where millions of reads/writes happen at each given second, so the performance is just incredible.
4. Lowers admin costs for a DevOps — you can forget about deciphering the logs and dealing with the unexpected issues — instead, you’ll concentrate on the key tasks.
5. An extreme resilience — it’s masterless cluster, so there is no Single Point of Failure. The data hashes are being constantly replicated throughout the cluster and your customers will not face the service downtime.

Read more — https://itsvit.com/blog/top-5-reasons-use-apache-cassandra-database/

Three Ways to Use Big Data to Help Your Startup Grow

The concept saying that Big Data usage is available only for such titans like Google, Facebook and Amazon is absolutely false. However, the dynamic development of Big Data mining instruments and various Big Data visualization apps makes analytics tangibly affordable.

Moreover, such a bolder approach can help to find the ways for future growth and product improvement, outline trends and habits of the targeted audience or mark relatively free market niches, and to optimize expenses.

Below are three ways to use Big Data to help your startup grow:

• Using Big Data to figure out the niche
• Using Big Data to figure out the competitors
• Using Big Data to figure out the customers

Read more → https://itsvit.com/blog/3-ways-use-big-data-help-startup-grow/

Big Data and Blockchain — the Future is Spectacular

Сryptocurrencies and other applications of blockchain tech are becoming more and more popular, and the number of transactional data stored within various ledgers becomes huge. Storing these data oceans at clouds like AWS or Azure cost quite a lot  — that’s the problem.

However, the pilot project started by Storjand other decentralized data storage providers showed up to 90% cost savings as compared to AWS.

In Japan, nearly 50 banks has partnered with Ripple, an open-source blockchain network with the world’s third largest market capitalization. This allowed the consortium decrease the time of processing a transaction significantly and reduce the associated costs nearly to zero.

Read more about Big Data and Blockchain reunion → https://itsvit.com/blog/blockchain-big-data-match-made-heavens/

Reinforced Learning: a quick review of the latest achievements

Reinforced Learning or RL is quite popular these days. The term refers to training an agent in an interactive and rewarding environment, essentially giving them experience, just like humans gain knowledge in the real life.

The famous AlphaGo from Google DeepMind is a prime example of such training: the bot analyse a numerous number of games and played versus itself to become better. 2017 brought even more impressive results:

— Reinforced learning with unsupervised auxiliary tasks;

— Robot training using Deep Learning virtual environments;

— RL using human feedback;

— Robot movement programming;

— Miscellaneous achievements;

— Datacenter cooling;

— A universal DL model.

READ MORE → https://itsvit.com/big-data/deep-learning-summary-2017-reinforced-learning-miscellaneous-apps/