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When looking at the words of Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, thinking of Big Data seems natural. Big Data–a dictum which currently seems to be on everyone’s lips–has recently developed into one of the most discussed topics in research and practice. Looking at academic publications, we find that more than 70% of all ranked papers which deal with Big Data were published within the last two years (Pospiech and Felden 2012) as well as nearly 12,000 hits for Big Data on GoogleScholar across various fields of research. In 2011, more than 530 academic Big Data related publications could be counted (Chen et al. 2012). We find more hits for “Big Data” than for “Development aid” in Google, and almost daily an IT-related business magazine publishes a Big Data special issue next to a myriad of Big Data business conferences. In Gartner’s current …