Data has grown at incredible rates these last few year, especially with the increasing popularity of social media and video streaming services such as YouTube. This paper looks at some of the challenges associated with the acquisition and processing of data. These challenges defer from the opportunities that can be exploited from the acquired data and are areas that can benefit from scientific research. In particular, the need to process large amounts of data in real-time is becoming a critical need in many areas such as social network trends, website statistics and intrusion detection in large data centres.peer-reviewe
