The unique components behind big data can be challenging to administer and maintain. This policy offers guidelines to help businesses achieve maximum yield from their big data investments.

From the policy:

Summary
Companies have relied upon data for decades as a means to engage in business practices and achieve operational success. However, the relatively new concept of “big data” has grown rapidly over the past few years. Businesses both large and small are leveraging the advantages of big data to ensure relevance and flexibility in today’s ever-changing economic and technological environment. The range of capabilities provided by the analysis of big data permits better understanding of business models, trends, and forecasting and are becoming common practice.

The term big data refers to the vast and diverse amount of information used by companies for business purposes as well as to the methods used to analyze and gain insights from that information. These methods involve both technology and the human effort behind it.

On the technological side, infrastructural components such as faster CPUs, greater expanses of memory, distributed systems, on/off premise environments, large-capacity storage arrays, and data interpretation software like Apache Hadoop are essential for successful big data strategies.

On the human side, new skills and knowledge based on data science and analytics, along with the ability to extract insights from massive amounts of complex information, have given rise to the careers based on the management of big data and the procurement of its benefits.

Purpose
The purpose of this policy is to provide guidelines for the administration, maintenance, and utilization of big data.

Because technical details will vary, this is not intended as a step-by-step usage guide, but rather as an overall set of guidelines that are application- and environment-agnostic. Vendor documentation/support should be consulted for specific instructions regarding databases, access controls, and informational analytics.

This policy can be customized as needed to fit the needs of your organization.

Scope
All employees, whether full-time, part-time, contract workers, consultants, interns, temporary workers, or other personnel, are covered by this policy. It also applies to all company-owned equipment or material related thereto, such as offsite cloud platforms or storage.