Between buzzwords like “cloud” and “big data”, it is hard to see through the mirage of mobile devices and social networks let alone analyze or store the data it produces.

Government Computer News brought this topic to our attention in their article, “What you need to know about big data.” It has been estimated that Wal-Mart records more than 1 million customer transactions each hour. This amazing statistics results in more than 2.5 petabytes of data being produced and stored. This is equivalent to 167 times the data stored in the Library Congress. You start talking about Facebook or YouTube and the numbers multiple.

So what do we do with all that data? This is where standards can be of benefit. The Open Group recently announced the availability of two new industry standards that enable businesses to embrace elements of service oriented architecture and cloud computing.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.