Using big data technologies for your business is a really a attractive thing, and Apache Hadoop makes it even more appealing now a days,
Hadoop is a massively scalable data storage platform that is used as foundation for many big data projects.
Hadoop is powerful, however it has a steep learning curve and significant investments required from the company in terms of time and other resources.
Hadoop can be really a game changer for your company if applied the right way, however there are plenty of ways it can go wrong.
On the other hand many of the businesses (unlike Google, Facebook or Twitter) are not really having "The Big Data" that needs a huge hadoop cluster to analyze things, however the Hadoop buzzword is attracting them.
As David Wheeler said "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection". Hadoop offers one such level of indirection; As a software architect, it may be really difficult to take the right decision when your top management is biased about some buzzwords.
In this article, I am trying to suggest some alternatives that should be tried before making an investment into Hadoop