Big Data holds out the promise of providing businesses with differentiated competitive insights. But those insights, protected by a healthy level of technical complexity, require large-scale data consumption and an innovative approach to the analysis of large public and private data sets. Currently, production Big Data implementations routinely process petabytes and even exabytes of data on a daily basis. Indeed, many of the technologies and implementation strategies for Big Data originated with web companies struggling with unprecedented volumes of data. At the same time, the economics of cloud computing - predicated on declines in the cost of data storage, bandwidth and computing time - point inevitably to the promise of Big Data rapidly becoming a reality for even comparatively small companies.