Hadoop is currently the most widely adopted Big Data platform, with a diverse ecosystem of applications and data sources for forensic evidence. An Apache Foundation framework solution, Hadoop has been developed and tested in enterprise systems as a Big Data solution. Hadoop is virtually synonymous with Big Data and has become the de facto standard in the industry.

As a new Big Data solution, Hadoop has experienced a high adoption rate by many types of organizations and users. Developed by Yahoo! in the mid-2000s—and released to the Apache Foundation as one of the first major open source Big Data frameworks—Hadoop is designed to enable the distributed processing of large, complex data sets across a set of clustered computers. Hadoop's distributed architecture and open source ecosystem of software packages make it ideal for speed, scalability, and flexibility. Hadoop's adoption by large-scale technology companies is well publicized...