“It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”(The New York Times, February 11, 2012) Although big data has been around for at least the last 50 years, what is unique now is the rate of acceleration and proliferation of data. It can be described with 6 V’s – value, volume, variety, velocity, variability, and veracity. There are considerations for its complexity, security, privacy, reliability, and accessibility. Its impact reaches beyond technologists and extends onto the consumer. IEEE launched an important new program, the Big Data Initiative (BDI). bigdata.ieee.org BDI is working to advance technologies that support and make sense out of exponentially growing mountains of data. BDI in collaboration with ISSRE intends to hold a workshop to identify areas of need and opportunity for standardization of data-related technologies. The goal is to plan and formulate a comprehensive end-to-end BD Standardization including: devices & accuracy of measurements made by devices; data communications and network reliability and performance including network capacity, transaction delay, quality & reliability; data security; data management; data visualization & analytics; and report to end user for near real time intelligent decisions & actions.