Big Data is probably the most talked-about topic in the IT world today. Currently, information is produced and stored at a rapidly exceeding rate. According to the current analysis, there are over 2 billion internet users and almost the double who own mobile phones. It is predicted that by 2020 the data produced will be nearly 44 times greater than that today. As the data is generated every second by everything around us, the volume of data increases simultaneously, and with this come numerous challenges in handling such large data sets, such as the increasing volume of data, transfer speed, heterogeneous data, and security. By overcoming such challenges and adopting the right implementation ways, Big Data is said to revolutionize the IT world. This paper is intended to provide a detailed view about Big Data and the phases of big data analytics, as well as the challenges encompassed in its implementation.