Big Data is a major step forward for digital businesses, and a concept that will set the standard for the tech industry in the years to come. However, despite the many benefits of Big Data, the technology is still very young. New methods and best practices are being created around Big Data all the time, and no one has all the answers yet.

To shed some light on the topic of how Big Data is being defined for the future, Dave Vellante of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, invited Ron Bodkin and Scott Gnau to a discussion at BigDataNYC 2015. Bodkin is the founder and president of Think Big, a Teradata Corp. Company, while Scott Gnau is the chief technology officer at Hortonworks, Inc.

Confidence in data is the key

Collecting data is only one side of the Big Data coin, finding the value in that data is the other. Companies are still learning the best ways to gather and store data so that it can be used as an effective resource. One of the major issues is getting accurate data, not just at the point of collection, but also once the data is pulled through a company’s systems. This requires data governance.

Data governance is the practice of managing the data to preserve its value. This includes accuracy, security and maintaining privacy. Evolving solid data governance policies are key to the maturation of Big Data as a technology.

The sunset of numbers and columns

These days, data comes in many forms. The kind of information that a business can simply plug into the numbers and columns of a spreadsheet is only a fraction of what Big Data collects. Companies must consider new tools to work with Big Data. Experience with Big Data is showing an ecosystem of tools, each tuned for its own kind of data, is required.

Of course, working with multiple tools means managing those tools so that they share and compliment each other. Companies must develop a unified data architecture that allows them to orchestrate their tools together, across many sources of data, for a common result. This is the way to bring value from a company’s data.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of BigDataNYC 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE