Members of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) have achieved first-stage approval of the first ITU-T standard on big data.
The standard details the requirements, capabilities and use cases of cloud-based big data as well as its ‘system context’, a high-level view of a cloud-based big data system and its relationships with other entities.
The new standard, “Recommendation ITU-T Y.3600 - Requirements and capabilities for cloud computing based big data,” 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.
The standard also 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 analyzed 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) as follows:
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.
Meanwhile, BDaaS is a cloud service category in which the capabilities provided to the cloud service customer are the ability to collect, store, analyze, visualize and manage data using big data technologies.
ITU said advances in 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.