Big Data of Amazon and Facebook

This report evaluates the IT infrastructure, data characteristics, and insights of big data solutions of Amazon and Facebook. It discusses the business goals and obstacles, IT infrastructure and automation environment, eco-system and methodologies, types of data maintained by the companies, data characteristics, insights of data, adoption of big data solutions, data security challenges, and social and ethical issues. Proper recommendations have been provided to address the challenges properly.

Running head: BIG DATA OF AMAZON AND FACEBOOK
BIG DATA OF AMAZON AND FACEBOOK
Name of the University
Name of the student
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Discussion..................................................................................................................................2
Business Goals and Obstacles................................................................................................2
IT Infrastructure and Automation Environment....................................................................3
Eco-System and Methodologies.............................................................................................4
Types of Data maintained by the companies.........................................................................5
Data Characteristics...............................................................................................................7
Insights of Data......................................................................................................................7
Adoption of Big Data Solutions.............................................................................................9
Data Security Challenges.....................................................................................................10
Social and Ethical issues......................................................................................................12
Recommendation with respect to big data solutions............................................................13
Conclusion................................................................................................................................14
References................................................................................................................................15

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Introduction
In the following assignment, two organizations have been chosen namely Facebook
and Amazon. The IT infrastructures of the companies have been evaluated and the
applications of the analytical data in their business domain has been widely evaluated in the
following report. A data analytical solution has been created using numerous big data
technique and concepts. In the discussion section, the business goals and the objective of the
respective companies have been evaluated. The infrastructures that are utilized by the
companies in maintain the big data has been explored and the types of data that are
maintained by these institutions have been evaluated. The techniques used and the process by
which the big data solutions are adopted are evaluated in the following assignment. The
challenges of big data related to data security has been explained and the ethical and social
issues that the mentioned companies face have been widely discussed. Proper
recommendations have been provided to address the challenges properly.
Discussion
Business Goals and Obstacles
Facebook is one of the leading social networks in the market and the business goals of
the organization are positioned through the vision and mission statement of the company. The
vision statement of the company acts as the guideline for the business personnel to reach
corporate effectiveness. The mission statement states the guidelines required for reaching the
vision with appropriate actions and strategies. The mission statement provides power to the
people to bring the world together and build communities. The business goals are aimed at
giving the people the power to make it more connected and open (Provost and Fawcett 2013).
The vision statement of the company is aimed at providing the community with a medium to

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express and share information and provide a tool for self-expression, discovery,
communication and market scope.
There are some obstacles though that Facebook needs to address before meeting its
business goals. The first obstacle is the data privacy scandal with Cambridge Analytica which
exposed its issues with data protection regulations (Davenport and Dyché 2013). The second
obstacle is the oversaturation of ads that has affected its revenue stream.
Amazon is one of the leading online retailers in the market. The business goals of the
company as mentioned in its vision and mission statement has pushed the organization
towards its desired goals. The company strives to become the most customer centric company
in the entire world where anybody can buy a product online from anywhere. The business
goals as mentioned in its mission statement states that that the company strives to offer its
customer base with the products at the most affordable and convenient way possible.
Some of the obstacles that the company faces in meeting its organizational goals is
due to the excessive competition in the retail segment lately such as FlipKart, Alibaba and
Wallmart. As more third party sellers are joining, the quality of its marketplace has
significantly decreased (Want To Use Big Data 2018). Lack of private selling has resulted in
a lot of junk that has affected its loyal customer base and overall revenue deviating it from
reaching its intended business goals.
IT Infrastructure and Automation Environment
After making the cloud market place, Amazon invested more than 6 billion dollars in
creating its IT infrastructure also known as AWS. Around the globe the company has more
than 40 data centers with the plans of creating around 15 additional data centres in the
coming years. The company uses around 600 megawatts to maintain its IT infrastructure. The

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compute capacity of the entire infrastructure comes from 14 different providers. It is
developed based on uptime and redundancy. The data centers are clustered around 11 regions
(Einav and Levin 2014). To avoid downtime, availability zones are present in every region
that allows customers to mirror their assets. Amazon web service or AWS has over 1.5
million servers and leases data center buildings from providers such as Corporate Office
Properties Trust and Digital Realty Trust.
Facebook has a wide number of data centers that are situated all across Asia, Europe
and Asia. Seven huge data centers are already running with the lowest carbon footprint
possible. The data centers all use clean renewable energy. The infrastructures are aimed at
supporting data intensive applications and provide better decision making for the entire team.
Efficient systems known as XARs are used for self-contained executables. Log devices are
used to storing the log information and the databases have been migrated to the more efficient
MyRocks instead of InnoB.
Eco-System and Methodologies
The ecosystem of Amazon is based on the Flywheel model that impacts the other
investments of Amazon. Most of the suppliers of Amazon are based in USA, Japan and UK.
The suppliers range from providing optical devices, transmitters and several electronics to
authentication services and electronic settlements. The customers of Amazon generally range
from 20 years old and above who have access to internet and online retail services. The main
competitors of the company are from Ebay and Alibaba which has grown its market share
considerably overseas in Asia. The distributors of the company are handled mostly by
Worldwide Distributors. Manufacturing warranties are distributed with the products and if the
item is flawed, then it can be returned or refunded within 10 days.

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The ecosystem of Facebook is catered towards a wide audience and has an impressive
targeting option. Facebook acquired Instagram to get into the revenue stream that the former
gets from the social ads (Chen and Zhang 2014). The similarity of both the social media
platforms helps the advertisers to buy ads with more or less the similar tools. The paid social
options are almost limited to Facebook due to its marketing size and Instagram’s fandom.
Recently, Facebook launched its own marketplace to combat its competitors like Amazon. It
even launched the instant articles and instant views to combat the published contents directly.
It has helped Facebook to get over 20 percent of clicks due to the instant articles instead of a
newsfeed article (Kaisler et al. 2013). To connect with its customers more efficiently,
Facebook uses Facebook insights which provides trusted analytics to expand its business
base.
Types of Data maintained by the companies
The different types of data that are maintained by Facebook and Amazon are written as
follows:-
 Things that the customer does and provides- Informations that are provided by the
customers such as locations of photos and data of files that are created in the platform.
These are collected so that the tips on camera filters and suggestion masks can be
provided to relevant users.
 Special protection data- The Company collects data that are related to health, political
and religious views. These information can be of union membership, philosophical
beliefs and ethnic origins. Information that are related to groups, hashtags, accounts,
pages and products (Raghupathi and Raghupathi 2014). If the customers chooses to
import a contact information or sync or upload them from their remote devices such

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as SMS logs, calls log and address books. These data are used to assist the platform in
finding people who are not yet in the platform and other purposes.
 Customer usage- The information about how the customer uses the products, how he
or she engages and views the features and contents, the action that is taken by them
and the duration of the activities are collected by the company. For example, the
information about a customer having last used a product and the views and products
that are related to the products are analysed by the company. The transactions that are
used on the product and the camera information are also collected by the respective
company. If the products of the company are used to purchase another product, then
the transaction procedure is recorded by the company (Facebook Under Fire 2018).
This falls under the category of contact details, shipping and billing information,
authentication information and debit and credit card information.
 Activities of customers on other customers- Information regarding analysing and
receiving the communications and content when the customers use the product of the
company. The information can range from the profile pf the person to the information
that is shared and uploaded to the sender.
 Device information- The devices that are integrated with the products of the company
are collected such as from web connected devices, connected TVs, phones and
computers. These informations are combined with other information from different
devices. This is done to personalize the experience of every user when they log into
another device from a preferred device (Groves et al. 2013). Information is also
collected from a user if h or she performs an action on an intended ad on the device.
 Device information- Data about plugins, file types and names, application types,
browser types, storage space remaining, signal strength, battery level, software
versions, hardware and operating systems. Behavioural and operational data whether

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the app back grounded or foregrounded or the movements of the mouse are collected.
The company includes specific identifiers such as device IDs and Unique identifiers
are associated with the account that the user is using (Sagiroglu and Sinanc 2013).
The information about the Bluetooth signals and the device signals are utilised.
Data Characteristics
The different types of data characteristics that are used by the mentioned companies are
written as follows:-
 Data engagement- This characteristic shows the number of times that the user has
taken on a particular content of the company’s website. It can involve leaving
comments, sharing and liking a content. It allow the mentioned companies to make
sure that the contents which they are uploading are valuable and gets exposure to a
wide number of audience (The Hill 2018).
 Data reach- It allow the mentioned companies to make sure that the contents which
they are uploading are valuable and gets exposure to a wide number of audience.
 Data impressions
 Data engagement and retention
Insights of Data
The techniques and methods that are used by the mentioned companies involves
collecting data from a number of sources. Methods such as using scraping tool and buying
information from the companies which serve the data as service model of business are used
for the collection purposes. Next, these companies store the data for further processing.
Storage services which have robust databases are used by companies such as Amazon to store

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data. Amazon normally use physical infrastructures for these purposes but it is slowly moving
to the cloud based infrastructure. The data which is collected by the mentioned companies are
then cleaned up and the noisy information is removed (Chen, Mao and Liu 2014). The data is
sorted, cleaned up and concatenated to make it ready for reorganization. With the help of
several tools like HDFS and Hadoop the unstructured formats are turned into structured
formats for further use. The big companies such as Facebook and Amazon normally verify
the data to check of their techniques are applied in the right direction.
The techniques which are used by Facebook include collecting information from third
party apps and websites. Recently, after the Cambridge Analytica incident, the company
highlighted that it collects information from people regardless of whether they have facebook
account or not. Facebook as well as Amazon helps the other websites or companies to serve
up relevant information to their customers through the data analytics that the company has.
The information is used by the company to provide relevant ads. Moreover in order to
provide ease of use it also stores the data related to the IP addresses of the devices that any
user used to login to their respective account. Connection between the friends in the network,
even the friends that were deleted from the account are also stored. Through the use of
processed Big data about the users helps Facebook and Amazon to have a better
understanding of the personal choices about the consumption behaviour and digital media of
each individual user on different platforms such as e-commerce (How Is Facebook Deploying
Big Data 2018). Through the analysis of traditional demographic data, the online platforms
can personalise product recommendations for the individual user. Through the use of the
user data it is also helpful for the different companies to increase the digital conversion
rates (from mere visitor to the loyal customer) by offering personalized product
recommendation on the Facebook pages of customers.

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The company uses the information to provide better ads. The company provides the
information in the form of operating systems used, browser information and IP address and
what other sites have been visited. Facebook and Amazon carefully checks the online
activities of its users and its technique of acquiring the information goes beyond the
advertisements which are targeted towards a particular audience (Najafabadi et al. 2015). The
company often uses techniques such as volunteer sharing of information like location, likes,
relationship status, employer and age. The non-users as well as the users are also tracked
when they are off site or working on other apps. Without the proper consent of the user, the
company uses biometric data of the face to process information. Techniques such as the
usage of Artificial intelligence is utilized by Facebook in collecting the information from its
users to analyse their behaviours. Software tools are often used for tracking the user
behaviour. The company links a number of buttons such as share and like with ubiquitous
softwares which can be implanted in other websites to collect the activities of users. In order
to collect and process big data face book uses Hadoop, scuba and other technologies
(Jagadish et al. 2014). The collected data includes, data related to every ad clicked, personal
information related to the maiden name, schools, hometown, events attended, current city,
name of the employer etc. In addition to that social networks like social groups, alumni
groups of school and college related information are also collected and stored by Facebook.
Adoption of Big Data Solutions
Organizations nowadays look for efficient solutions and technologies to harness the
full power of big data which has the capability ti analyse and process the various data types.
Amazon and Facebook use the Hadoop system for deployment and selection in its
organizational branches. The only barrier in the adoption process is the growing concern of
data privacy among the consumers. The companies need to implement other data retrieval

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and management systems as well as work on the security features that are lacking in Hadoop.
The determinants that are used in the adoption of big data are technological contexts like
perceived computability and complexity, organizational contexts such as information and
cultural security and top management support and environmental contexts such as
outsourcing risks and security concerns.
Data Security Challenges
Both Facebook and Amazon use big data extensively in providing several
organizational advantages. But the security challenges that are associated with this needs to
be properly addressed by both companies to improve its data security.
As both the companies are multinational and has several departments all over the
world, the data driven culture of the firms creates problem for the people working in the
companies. The main reasons for these are the cultural shifts and the improper alignment of
their organization with their objectives (Kitchin 2014). The absence of middle management
understanding and adoption aggravates the issue. Moreover, the resistance of the business to
change with the cultural diversities of the communities can hamper the organizational goals
of the company. For proper decision making, the mentioned companies need to properly
invest in string leaders who can understand the challenges of big data in an organizational
workplace.
The second challenge is data security. It is quite imperative that large scale data
centres prior to Amazon and Facebook are a target for persistent threats and hackers. Less
than 30 percent of the data repositories that are present around the world employ additional
measures to check big data. The additional measures include access control and identity
control, data segregation and data encryption (Richards and King 2014).

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The third challenge is data validation. Amazon and Facebook has several departments
which gets similar information from a number of systems. The data does not always match
and provide the desired results. The ecommerce system can have a different result from the
ERP system of the mentioned companies. This can happen due to improper governance of
data. This challenge is serious to mitigate as the process of mitigation requires a set of
technologies as well as policies. The data accuracy needs to be increased and the human
errors need to be minimized for better data validation.
The fourth challenge that needs to be addressed by the mentioned companies is the
retaining and recruitment of big data talents. To make applications that generate analytics for
big data, there is a growing demand for professionals with big data expertise. More training
needs to be provided to staff members and services with machine learning capabilities need to
be adopted to make up for the lack of big data experts.
The fifth challenge that both the companies have to address is the generation of the
information in a timely manner (Andrejevic 2014). The business goals of Amazon and
Facebook can be achieved if the information is not only stored but also analysed to become
competitive in the market. The organizations can only use the big data effectively if the
insights are generated quickly.
The sixth challenge is the increasing number of structured as well as unstructured data
in the respective organizations. As most of the data is unstructured, it is very difficult to
analyse and search them such as photos, images and videos. The mentioned companies need
to invest on tiering, deduplication and compression technologies to decrease the amount of
space that that the big data is taking and reduce the cost of its maintenance.

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Social and Ethical issues
The social and ethical issues faced due to the use of big data by the mentioned
institutions like Facebook and Amazon are immense due to the ongoing research on the
current field. Issues related to security, privacy, polarization, stigmatization, discrimination,
self-determination, autonomy, consent, trust, integrity and transparency occur due to violation
of human dignity, security and moral principles (Fan and Bifet 2013).
Facebook has been using big data to harvest the information about its users from its
social media platform activities. The social and ethical issues faced by the company due to
the ongoing scandal with Cambridge Analytica has gained a lot of attention lately. The issue
was related with a US consulting firm which took the big data information about customer
information without their prior notification such as the contents they liked. Their data privacy
and confidentiality were violated which was illegally used by the company during the voting
season where they sold the data to other firms for political propagandas (Talia 2013). The
data was used to change the behaviours of audience and helped in assessing illegal methods
to diminish images of political candidates.
The ethics of big data are dependent on four variables namely reputation, ownership,
privacy and identity. Amazon did a mistake of not properly correlating the aspects of the
participation agreements with the customer properly about what data to correlate, aggregate
and summarize (Gandomi and Haider 2015). The company faced an ethical ad social issue
recently when it predicted the client delivery date and whether their clients are pregnant or
not with a probability of around 90%. It was able to do this as it has the capability to analyse
the bug data of their client’s shopping habits. The company combined his data with other
analytical data to offer expectant mothers with baby related items. But the social and ethical
issue arised from a situation where the company knew about the pregnancy of a teenager
before her father did. Significant risks were connected with the situation which Amazon

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accepted (Jin et al. 2015). The discussed issues faced by Amazon are related to how the
company is identifying potential customers and the issues that are related to significant risks
from client acquisitions about the spying nature. The issues that arises here all related to data
identity and include reidentification, anonymization and identifying personal information.
Recommendation with respect to big data solutions
The recommendations that are provided with respect to big data solutions for the
mentioned companies are listed as follows:-
 Technologies such as machine learning, artificial machine, business intelligence
applications, big data analytics, Spark, Hadoop and NoSQL databases need to be
often used by enterprises on the analysis and management side (Big Data Solutions
2018). This is essential for the mentioned companies to g through the huge number of
big data efficiently and provide the insights that are necessary for the success of the
companies.
 To recruit big data talent, the mentioned companies need to increase their budget for
retention and recruitment of the necessary recruits. To develop the staff from within,
more opportunities of training need to be provided for developing their talent. The
analytics solutions need to be bought by the mentioned companies which have the
added capabilities of machine learning and self-servicing. This is necessary when the
company fails to find proper professional recruits for maintaining its big data goals.
 The companies need to not only invest on data analytics software but also on their
integration technology with the existing software that the mentioned companies are
using. The documents created by employees, email systems, social media streams and

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enterprise applications need to be integrated properly for efficient analysis results
(Assunção et al. 2015).
 Additional security measures such as repositories need to be increased in the
mentioned companies to properly secure the usage of big data. Proper access controls
and identity controls need to be implemented for efficient management of big data in
the respective enterprises.
 The organizational alignment need to be sufficient. The middle management needs to
properly carry out its duty of implement the benefits of big data to its respective
employees to gain competitive advantage in the present economy which is completely
data driven (De Mauro, Greco and Grimaldi 2015).
Conclusion
To conclude the report, it can be stated that the data that are maintained by the
respective companies have been evaluated conclusively in the assignment. The obstacles and
business goals of the mentioned companies have been provided. The mentioned companies
strives to become the most customer centric companies in the entire world. The business
goals as mentioned in its mission statement states that that the company strives to offer its
customer base with the products at the most affordable and convenient way possible. The
automation environment as well as the IT infrastructure of Amazon and Facebook has been
mentioned and assessed. The methodologies and ecosystem of the respective companies are
discussed. The types of data as well as their characteristics have been assessed that are
maintained by the companies. The techniques and methods used in getting the insights o the
data are mentioned and the adoption solutions have been discussed. The challenges as well as
the issues related to social and ethical concerns have been evaluated in the assignment. To

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properly address the big data concerns, proper recommendations have been provided that can
be used by the chosen companies to address future concerns regarding big data.

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