The document discusses the rise of big data and how organizations are adopting big data solutions. It describes how data has exploded in terms of volume, velocity, and variety. This includes new types of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from sources like sensors, social media, and machine logs. Common big data platforms are Hadoop, HBase, MongoDB and data is stored and analyzed in data lakes. The adoption of big data is driven by needs for social intelligence, predictive analytics, complex queries and integrating new data sources. Organizations are adopting big data platforms for archiving, offloading from data warehouses, and advanced analytics on new data types.