Our society is leaving behind digital footprints continuously. When we use our mobile phones, social media, digital wearable or internet we mark a datapoint of our presence in the digital world. If this huge amount of footprints can be captured and analysed it can help us reveal insights that was never possible to see before.
Big data as defined by Gartner’s ‘3V’ model can be simplified as ‘Data with high volume, high velocity and variety’. Today data around us is quickly growing from megabytes to petabytes. Moreover, this amount of data is being generated at very fast pace leading to new challenges. Big data challenge is not just about the amount of data but, being able to exact the value that is hidden in the data.
Volume
How to store high volume of data at low cost? How to analyse huge volume of data as fast as possible to find insights from it?
Velocity
How to analyse high velocity data in near-realtime?
Variety
How to manage wide variety of data such as social, mobile, photos, videos and machine generated data to find insights by merging multiple data sources altogether?
Why you should care?
Improve product or Service: Being able to extract value from big data is a great advantage for businesses to understand their customers and improve their product or services. Today’s big data technologies allow to capture value from social data such as twitter or facebook and understand your customer needs. Hundreds of thousands of customer care data can be processed to find insights about your product or service. For example, which product-part is receiving highest complaints? Which product feature needs improvement immediately? And so on. Big data analytics can help you answer many more such questions while revealing some never-known facts about product or service.
Reduce the cost: Big data technologies such as hadoop allows to store huge amount of data on low-cost hardware, especially offered by leveraging public cloud or private cloud. Offloading ETL processes from your data warehouses can be a huge saving, as you will never be in-compliant with SLAs.
Drive your decisions based on data: By harnessing the power of big data you can capture every-thing about your business data that can be analysed. For example, online-retail-outlets as opposed to traditional retail outlet can capture every-thing. Such as, what their customer purchased? what items they looked at while shopping? How long they looked at those items? Once these details are captured they can quickly analyse to find cross-selling opportunities or recommend items based on past purchase habits.
Using big data enables managers to decide on the basis of evidence rather than intuition. Big data technologies are empowering businesses with real-time analytics that allow them to find trends and catch anomalies quickly that was never possible before. Instantaneous reporting through visualization tools and dashboards make it possible to take fast business-decisions backed by data.