Data is everywhere. Numerous digital processes in different sectors produce enormous data every day. Among business forecasts for the year 2012, various analyst firms predicted the amount of digital data or information would jump to approximately 3 billion TB, up 49 percent from year 2011. By 2016, the analyst firms predicted, that the amount of digital data will reach 9 billion TB. So what is this BIG DATA? Technically speaking, big data is a collection of data sets so complex and large that it becomes difficult to process it by applying available database management techniques and tools.

The current world produces a surprising amount of data. Processing of a big data group or cluster can be complicated, particularly bearing in mind the need for infrastructure, space, and computing power. Big Data is actually meant to be analyzed and researched for better decision making, market predictions, business intelligence and innovations. So Big Data Analysis is certainly has great scope and value, but in practicality this could be quite complex and need expertise and extremely high end information processing. One option is to think about applying cloud computing as a practical and economical mode to go. With access to huge distributed computing power cloud computing possess extra ability for an analyzing big data clusters. Also the increasing adoption of mobile data access and cloud services like business email (Hosted Exchange 2010) and cloud storage has also expanded the market for various related tools and innovations. Directly or indirectly these innovations have raised the opportunities of driving business value from Big Data or simply in accelerating the process of big data analysis.

Big data represents big prospects for businesses to extract large amounts of information from different resources to make innovative ideas about products and services, better decisions by discovering market trends.  Due to the huge processing power requirements, big data analysis is generally deployed in a cloud computing environment, be it a public cloud or private cloud. The present cloud computing services (PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS) achieve enhanced execution effectiveness by aggregating execution environments of application at different levels including OS, middleware, server levels and proper sharing of these among cloud users.

Organizations and associations are increasingly having big data frameworks spread across public and private cloud and on-premises data centers too.  Again, it is estimated that by 2016 nearly 25 percent of information will be managed by using cloud computing concepts. The challenge in leveraging big data in cloud environment is implementing structural designs which are able to deploy reliable security techniques and access controls, consistent privilege management and a trust-based systems network for end to end data encryption moving among these systems.

Hence there is no surprise that organizations are turning to cloud environment to analyze, process, and eventually accumulate big data. Big data needs data science experts along with highly developed technologies, investments and large distributed computing power because big data contains massive amounts of externally interfaced data.  With economical and easy access to computing power, cloud computing is perfect environment for diving into the big data sea. Undoubtedly, big data could deliver great value if data is processed timely and accurately and cloud computing is no doubt is ideal to spur the process.