I think big data is a bad term, the key issue is whether you're using data to drive your decision making, not how much of it you have or what storage technology

I think big data is a bad term, the key issue is whether you're using data to drive your decision making, not how much of it you have or what storage technology your using. If you're Amazon or Facebook then, sure, you've got to crunch through many TB to get to an answer, if you're an insurance broker turning over $100m from 2000 customers then there's no way making a business decision should need more than a few SQL queries on relational databases. But saying you're into big data is now almost a shorthand for saying, we analyse our data and use that to drive our decision making.