Interestingly, when the concept of Big Data emerged, it started as a difficult technical problem to solve. When data volumes began to increase in early 2000, storage technologies were overwhelmed by the terabytes of data being stored, creating a data scalability crisis.

Over the years and a growing evolution in storage capacity, the problem started to become a business opportunity. Nowadays, companies explore Big Data in order to uncover hitherto unknown facts about their businesses.

Big Data mining is of growing importance, especially at a time of economic recession that has forced many businesses to reinvent themselves and rely more on their online activity. A deeper analysis of Big Data allowed us to understand the current state of its business, analyse changing processes and the behaviour of its customers.

As the name implies, Big Data provides gigantic statistical samples that substantially improve the results of analytics tools. As a general rule, the larger the data sample, the more accurate the statistics will be, making analysis easier.

If in the early days of the internet it was out of this world to have a visit counter on your website, now we've gone much further, managing to make a detailed analysis of your website visitors and their behaviour throughout the visit.

Advanced analytics is quite common nowadays and most websites today use some kind of analytics or other tools based on Big Data. Anything that involves customers can benefit from Big Data analytics. A greater understanding of changes in the business allows for better planning, identification of opportunities and threats. Potential benefits include customer loyalty, experience optimisation and vendor performance based on cost and quality.