Law360, New York ( July 7, 2015, 10:10 AM EDT) -- "What's the big deal with big data?" In the rapidly expanding landscape of Internet-based data analytic services, the majority of companies with a significant online presence have either already asked this question or will be asking it in very near future. But what exactly is "big data"? "Big data" is defined by the Cloud Security Alliance as "the massive amounts of digital information companies and governments collect about human beings and our environment."[1] More robust definitions also include the acquisition and analysis of such large and complex data sets from Internet-based technologies. Big data is typically unformatted, nonuniform and was long thought by companies to be of no value because the size and structure of the data exceeded the processing capacity of conventional database systems. Indeed, until the last few years the technology needed for companies to analyze and evaluate big data was nonexistent....