CGartner defines Big Data as Information Assets with high volume, high velocity, and/or high variety that require new forms of storage and processing to enable enhanced decision making, insight discovery and process OPTIMIZATION
Many of these new Information Assets consist of large volumes of unstructured data (such as email, social data, GPS data, sensor data, mobile data, and audio and video files) that traditonal Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and Business Intelligence (BI) tools just aren’t equipped to deal with.