"Big Data" is term heard more and more in industry – but what does it really mean? There is a vagueness to the term reminiscent of that experienced in the early days of cloud computing. This has led to a number of implications for various industries and enterprises. These range from identifying the actual skills needed to recruit talent to articulating the requirements of a "big data" project. Secondary implications include difficulties in finding solutions that are appropriate to the problems at hand – versus solutions looking for problems. This presentation will take a look at Big Data and offer the audience with some considerations they may use immediately to assess the use of analytics in solving their problems. The talk begins with an idea of how big "Big Data" can be. This leads to an appreciation of how important "Management Questions" are to assessing analytic needs. The fields of data and analysis have become extremely important and impact nearly all facets of life and business. During the talk we will look at the two pillars of Big Data – Data Warehousing and Predictive Analytics. Then we will explore the open source tools and datasets available to NATO action officers to work in this domain. Use cases relevant to NATO will be explored with the purpose of show where analytics lies hidden within many of the day-to-day problems of enterprises. The presentation will close with a look at the future. Advances in the area of semantic technologies continue. The much acclaimed consultants at Gartner listed Big Data and Semantic Technologies as the first- and third-ranked top technology trends to modernize information management in the coming decade. They note there is an incredible value "locked inside all this ungoverned and underused information." HQ SACT can leverage this powerful analytic approach to capture requirement trends when establishing acquisition strategies, monitor Priority Shortfall Areas, prepare solicitations, and retrieve meaningful data from archives.