In general, there are six different types of assets that can be identified in a Big Data ecosystem: the hardware infrastructure, the services and applications, the data and metadata, the analytical resources, the security and privacy techniques, and the individuals and roles. It is important to carry out a rigorous study of the different possibilities to decide which one is the option that best fits your Big Data requirements. The selection of assets will highly influence the implementation of the Big Data, so it is necessary to check the compatibility between the different elements before acquiring them. In some cases, the assets are already part of the company so there is no need to acquire them. A widely used solution for this type of problem are decision-making trees which allow the comparison of advantages and disadvantages between different possibilities.

Reference:

• NBD-WG, NIST, ‘NIST Big Data Reference Architecture’, Jun-2018. [Online]. Available: https://bigdatawg.nist.gov/_uploadfiles/M0639_v1_9796711131.docx.