First you get the data, then you get the power

[ Definition ]: Data are any information/facts that can be seen or feel.

[ Clarification ]: We as human always looking for knowledge which will guide us to understand everything around us, as well to understand each other as humans, and for that God provide us a masterpiece of engineering and the key for our human civilization; "the Brain" which is connected to millions of sensors that it's only job is to collect "Data" in a lot of ways (physical, geographical, cultural and more). Which eventually the brain will use a set of driven processing modules to recognize each data and store it in its memory to be used later for analyzing and expressions.

Due to the huge amount of data and the weakness of controlling the way of storing and memorizing it, the human start to store the data in different ways, and that what the Sumerian Civilization starts 3000 years before Christ to write all data (knowledge) they know on stone or clay tablets. That was an effective way to demonstrate a rich view into trade, worship, life, death, medicine and almost every other aspect of the Sumerians world that helps a lot the future generations after them.

Data storing growth tremendously from that time till our current modern times and currently we are calling it "Big Data" as the amount of data is unmeasurable in specific numbers or characters. this amount of data start grows due to the invention of semiconductors memory before 70 years ago as data start to be learned and stored by non-human senses/brain. This data is to be called "Digital data".

All digital data storage technologies operate on the same principles. Bits of information can be stored in any material containing two distinctive and switchable physical states. In binary code, the digital information is stored as ones and zeroes, also known as bits. Eight bits form a byte.

A logical zero or one is allocated to each physical state as volts. The smaller these physical states are; the more bits can be packed in the storage device. The width of digital bits today is around 10 to 30 nanometers (billionths of a meter). These devices are very complex because developing devices capable of storing information at this scale requires controlling materials on the atomic level.

Big data has revolutionized the modern business environment in recent years. A mixture of structured, semi structured and unstructured data, big data is a collection of information that organizations can mine for business purposes through several advance data analytics applications.

Each day on Earth we generate 500 million tweets, 294 billion emails, 4 million gigabytes of Facebook data, 65 billion WhatsApp messages and 720,000 hours of new content added daily on YouTube.

In 2018, the total amount of data created, captured, copied and consumed in the world was 33 zettabytes (ZB) – the equivalent of 33 trillion gigabytes. This grew to 79ZB in 2020 and is predicted to reach a mind-boggling 181ZB by 2025. One zettabyte is 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits, can you imagine this !!.

Now this is gold, but what are the ways for collecting and using it in businesses benefit, that what we will take about below.

[ Data Mining/Analyzing/Reporting ]

There are several ways to collect data, but how to store it, here we will focus on the way for collecting Digital Data, as other types of data are not controllable and easy to be collected.

As the time I'm writing this, there are three ways to collect and store data

??1- Global collection devices: which usually stored in something we call it endpoints, which include all internet of things devices, PCs, smartphones and all other information storage devices.

???2- Edge devices: storing data in large scale devices(servers) like cell towers, institutional servers and offices, such as universities, government offices, banks and factories.

????3- Core devices: which where the major data stored, like Traditional data center or what is nowadays called cloud data centers.

The largest data servers in the world are in China Telecom Data Center, which occupies 10.7 million square feet and uses 815 megawatts of power. "As you might know that most power goes to data, and other goes to cooling and processing.

After understanding the areas of where the data located, the next action is knowing the type of data, the sources of data and what methods are being used in collecting it.

before going to analyzing the data, you should:

* First ask yourself below questions:

??1- What’s the goal or purpose of the use of this data?

??2- What kinds/type of data are they planning on collecting?

??3- What methods and procedures will be used to collect, store, and process the information?

??4- Is it doable to break it into "Qualitative" and "Quantative" types:

???? - Qualitative: data covers descriptions such as color, size, quality, and appearance.

??????- Quantative: data deals with numbers such as statistics, poll numbers, percentages, etc.

* Second, you should know if this is Primary Data or Secondary data:?

????- Primary Data: are first-hand data collected and explore, but usually this type of data is time-consuming and expensive, but it can generate lots of money and information.

?????- Secondary Data: are the second-hand data and it’s already has undergone statistical analysis. its easier and cheaper to be collected and use, and usually such type of data are used for several reasons like information joining and reports validation .. etc.

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Having the above information in hand, then we can implement below steps after data identified:

??????? Data cleaning: Removal of data with the highest level of noise and inconsistency.

??????? Data integration: Connecting multiple data sources.

??????? Data selection: Removing data, which need analysis, from the database.

??????? Data Documenting: Data collection or conversion to appropriate formats by applying appropriate methods.

????? ? Data Analyzing: Identification of patterns representing information based on certain criteria.

????? ? Data Reporting: Representation of information by using visualization techniques.

In our next articles, we will talk about Data Analyzing and Data Reporting as it what really provide impact to nowadays business strategies.

Until then, thank you for your time.

Zahraa R. Jasim