Big Data: A Blessing for Businesses

As we talk about the use of data in businesses, it is constantly increasing and every small and big organization are collecting a large amount of data from their user interaction to optimize their business in term of quality, cost reduction, new product development, and user experience. 

The term “Big Data” stands for large data sets and computing technologies and strategies used to manage these large data sets (Justin Ellingwood,2016). 

As per Industry analyst Doug Laney (Sas,2019), now mainstream big data can be defined as the three V’s: 

• Volume: Companies are collecting a large amount of data sets and this demand for proper storage and allocation. Applying the right computing technologies become a necessity for the companies to manage their large data sets, which can be achieved by some available tools in the market like Apache Hadoop.  

• Velocity: Large amount of data crosses the internet every second along with various other offline sources. Companies have to be fast enough to process all the real-time data and deliver the results accordingly.  

• Variety: The data is being collected in various formats and from various sources, both online and offline. This data is mostly collected in its raw format i.e. image can be stored along with text in the database and can be changed at the time of processing (Justin Ellingwood, 2016).

 Big data combined with analytics

Combining big data with analytics, companies can gain more competitive advantage in term of:

• More personalized promotions (HBR,2012).
• Noticing customer buying habits (SAS,2019).
• Cost-effective 
• Building effective customer relationships
• Increase Productivity 
• First mover advantage 

 Big data flows through various systems, sources, size or owner, businesses should take all necessary steps needed to organize the complex data landscape by infusing strategical steps from identifying, storing, analyzing to make data-driven decisions (SAS,2019).

 References

1. McAfee, A. and Brynjolfssn, E. (2012). Big Data: The Management Revolution. [pdf]. Harvard Business Review. Available at https://wiki.uib.no/info310/images/4/4c/McAfeeBrynjolfsson2012-BigData-TheManagementRevolution-HBR.pdf [ Accessed 23 Jan. 2020].
2. Ellingwood, J. (2016). An Introduction to Big Data Concepts and Terminology. [online] Digitalocean.com. Available at: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/an-introduction-to-big-data-concepts-and-terminology [ Accessed 23 Jan. 2020].
3. SAS Insights (2019) BigData: What it is and why it matters, SAS.Com. Available at: https://www.sas.com/en_ie/insights/big-data/what-is-big-data.html [Accessed: 23 Jan. 2020].