Between 2003 and now, the amount of data generated has grown exponentially from 5 exabytes every 2 days to an expected 2700 exabytes in 2012. Big data is characterized by volume, velocity, and variety, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from terabytes to exabytes and streaming data. Analytics has evolved from descriptive to predictive to prescriptive. Big data analytics uses complex algorithms on large volumes of internal and external data ranging from tens to hundreds of petabytes to provide experimental and ad hoc insights.