Big data is everywhere. In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on big data, business analytics, and "smart" living and work environments. Though these conversations are predominantly practice driven, organizations are exploring how large-volume data can usefully be deployed to create and capture value for individuals, businesses, communities, and governments. Whether it is machine learning and web analytics to predict individual action, consumer choice, search behavior, traffic patterns, or disease outbreaks, big data is fast becoming a tool that not only analyzes patterns, but can also provide the predictive likelihood of an event. Organizations have jumped on this bandwagon of using ever-increasing volumes of data, often in tera- or petabytes' worth of storage capacity, to better predict outcomes with greater precision. In current information technology infrastructures, the provision of services such as network connectivity is usually associated with a Service Level Agreement defining the nature and quality of the service to be provided.