SUMMARY
Big data is currently one of the most critical emerging technologies. Big Data are used as a concept that refers to the inability of traditional data architectures to efficiently handle the new data sets. The 4V’s of big data – volume, velocity, variety and veracity makes the data management and analytics challenging for the traditional data warehouses. It is important to think of big data and analytics together. Big data is the term used to describe the recent explosion of different types of data from disparate sources. Analytics is about examining data to derive interesting and relevant trends and patterns, which can be used to inform decisions, optimize processes, and even drive new business models. Cloud computing seems to be a perfect vehicle for hosting big data workloads. However, working on big data in the cloud brings its own challenge of reconciling two contradictory design principles. Cloud computing is based on the concepts of consolidation and resource pooling, but big data systems (such as Hadoop) are built on the shared nothing principle, where each node is independent and selfsufficient. The integrating big data with cloud computing technologies, businesses and education institutes can have a better direction to the future. The capability to store large amounts of data in different forms and process it all at very large speeds will result in data that can guide businesses and education institutes in developing fast. Nevertheless, there is a large concern regarding privacy and security issues when moving to the cloud which is the main causes as to why businesses and educational institutes will not move to the cloud. This paper introduces the characteristics, trends and challenges of big data. In addition to that, it investigates the benefits and the risks that may rise out of the integration between big data and cloud computing.