Data and information are fuel of this new age where powerful analytics algorithms burn this fuel to generate decisions that are expected to create a smarter and more efficient world for all of us to live in. This new area of technology has been defined as Big Data Science and Analytics, and the industrial and academic communities are realizing this as a competitive technology that can generate significant new wealth and opportunity.

Big data is defined as collections of datasets whose volume, velocity or variety is so large that it is difficult to store, manage, process and analyze...

Recent industry surveys expect the cloud computing services market to be in excess of $20 billion and cloud computing jobs to be in excess of 10 million worldwide in 2014 alone. In addition, since a majority of existing information technology (IT) jobs is focused on maintaining legacy in-house systems, the demand for these kinds of jobs is likely to drop rapidly if cloud computing continues to take hold of the industry. However, there are very few educational options available in the area of cloud computing beyond vendor-specific training by cloud providers themselves. Cloud computing courses...