I recently attended the seminar CloudFest Azure Workshop at the Microsoft offices in downtown Portland, OR. The event was hosted by Northwest Cadence and the Marquam Group and had two tracts, Dev/Ops and Azure Active Directory. I attended AAD and ended up leaving half way through the day very disappointed.
Despite my disappointment with the event as a whole, the opening presentation by Northwest Cadence's Steven Borg was good and he gave a story that blew my mind. He described an Azure seminar he'd recently attended where the subject of big data was discussed. In that seminar he met an engineer form Boeing who told him they have engines with IoT devices collecting 1 TB of data per hour of operation. That's 1 TB per engine, per plane, per hour in flight. That's quite simply a crazy amount of data.
The gentleman was then asked what Boeing did with all that data. His response, "nothing yet, we don't have enough".
That's big data.