Big Data is one of the most buzz-worthy fields in tech. Its name is simple but it conveys a huge tidal wave of information and can even sound intimidating. From the IT management perspective, it is becoming one of the most important issues of training and technology on the horizon; the people who can master its tools and techniques are in short supply. As important as the field is becoming, it is useful to remove some of the mystery and create a more accurate vision of what Big Data means for IT. Any Huge Data Warehouse Uses “Big Data” The need for Big Data has arisen from the fact that organizations are managing amounts of data that routinely reach into petabytes. However, Big Data is not just another term for this unwieldy accumulation of data. Rather, it refers to the tools and data science techniques that are necessary to analyze data at this scale. Big Data Is About Hadoop Hadoop turns up in nearly every conversation surrounding Big Data, and this is because it is nearly always the base foundation of any effort to adopt Big Data practices. However, it is just one of the available tools and platforms that are useful to Big Data professionals. The platform itself shows its value when coupled with other tools such as Hive, HBase, Pig, and Cloudera Impala. Big Data Does the Decision Making When it comes down to it, executives and engineers aren’t at the point in which they let algorithms make all of the decisions. Rather, Big Data techniques allow IT professionals to find patterns that are otherwise too difficult to find in such massive stores of data, and then it is up to human decision makers to put these patterns to good use.