Facilitating Role of Cloud Computing in Driving Big Data Emergence

Big data emerges as an important technology that addresses the storage, processing and analytics aspects of massive data characterized by 5V's (volume, velocity, variety, veracity, value) which has grown exponentially beyond the handling capacity traditional data architectures. The most significant technologies include the parallel storage and processing framework which requires entirely new IT infrastructures to facilitate big data adoption. Cloud computing emerges as a successful paradigm in computing technology that shifted the business landscape of IT infrastructures towards service-oriented basis. Cloud service providers build IT infrastructures and technologies and offer them as services which can be accessed through internet to the consumers. This paper discusses on the facilitating role of cloud computing in the field of big data analytics. Cloud deployment models concerning the architectural aspect and the current trend of adoption are introduced. The fundamental cloud services models concerning the infrastructural and technological provisioning are introduced while the emerging cloud services models related to big data are discussed with examples of technology platforms offered by the big cloud service providers - Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Cloudera. The main advantages of cloud adoption in terms of availability and scalability for big data are reiterated. Lastly, the challenges concerning cloud security, data privacy and data governance of consuming and adopting big data in the cloud are highlighted.