Abstract
The Internet plays an important role in the modern world. With the increasing usage of internet and web-based applications, various enterprises turn to big data solutions to cope up with the changing demand. In this big data era, data is the most valuable entity as it is mainly used by businesses for future prediction and decision making. With a substantial increase in the scale of big data, storing and managing the same is a great challenge. However, technologies such as cloud computing offer cost-effective, well-suited and consistent on-demand services that can be adopted by industries for big data and analytics. This paper aims to investigate various features, technologies available in big data and cloud computing, how cloud computing is used in par with big data. Also, the challenges faced in a cloud environment and big data and why the cloud is needed for big data is been discussed. Finally, some of the future directions for our research is been highlighted.

Key words: Cloud computing, Big data, Hadoop, NoSQL, Data analytics