Big data in healthcare: challenge or opportunity?

Thanks to the Web, the world is witnessing a deluge of data barely imaginable a decade ago.

Global data flows have increased fourfold over the past five years, and are expected to increase by a factor of three over the next five.

Networking giant Cisco speaks of the arrival of the Zettabyte Era at the end of 2015, when Internet traffic is expected to go over 1 billion terabytes (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). By 2017, the number of connected devices will be nearly three times as high as the world