Big data has been a buzzword in the IT industry recently. Thanks to the growing IoT trend and the growth of cloud adaptation, more data are generated daily than anytime before. Indeed, according to IBM, 90 percent of today’s data has been created in the past two years–commenting that big data has never been more relevant.
As such, big data will be considered a primary means to get ahead of the curve for enterprises across industries because it delivers actionable insights about the customers, sales funnel, and the health of business operations.
Small to medium sized enterprises need not be daunted. The benefits of big data are not a luxury of big businesses. Ways to incorporate big data into the business model are also accessible for any size of business. Effort must only be invested in the enterprise’s technology to cater for storing and analyzing big data.
To guide you further, here are the things you need to consider to build an infrastructure that can efficiently reap the benefits of big data.
Gather and Source Relevant Data
The first step in turning big data into useful insight is of course gathering and sourcing data. Without conducive infrastructure, you cannot source relevant data for your business. Data include sales record, customer feedbacks, marketing list, email archive and everything within the business operation. To source these data, you need to invest in an infrastructure that can collect the data for useful insight generation or analytics.
This includes broadening the means by which you can monitor the behavior of your target market and the efficiency of your business operation. You need to actively engage in social media, add website plug-ins that monitor changes in your website, and prompts in your website. You also may need to monitor the business operation within the company through sensors e.g CCTV, and advanced NAC & MDM to keep track of devices connected to your server or network.
Use Cost Effective Data Storage
When you finally have a broad scheme in sourcing data, the next thing you need is a data storage. As a business owner, you want to save resources for this. Hence, cost-effective data storage solution is what you need to maintain a big data infrastructure. This is only fitting because big data grows exponentially as time passes by.
By cost-effective storage we mean that it is a scalable and smart storage. A standard for a cost-effective storage is that which is scalable enough to immediately meet data storage needs and smart enough to save storage capacity with real-time data compression. You can find this benefit in cloud solutions.
Leading enterprises are turning to cloud storage because it is scalable, cost-effective reliable and offers huge accessibility–which leads us to the next item.
Organize and Evaluate Your Data
The big data you collected and stored have one main purpose, to deliver useful insights about certain aspects of your business operation. This is the raison d’ etre of big data: big data are nothing without the necessary analytics tools.
Analytics tool helps organize and evaluate the data to provide useful and relevant insights. Presently, only big companies have the manpower, time and resources to prepare and analyze big data. Chances are you will need an IT person to run analytics tool to turn your data into useful insights.
Good to know, there are a number of big data analytics software in the market. Your options include:
- Google BigQuery
- Oracle’s Orcl
- Microsoft HDInsight
- Amazon Web Services
Aside from these big names, there are also startups that offer quality services which are ideal for small businesses.
Make Data Accessible for the Right People
Finally, your overall big data infrastructure should be fitted to make the insights accessible to the right people at the right time. Gleaned insights are commonly translated into reports that includes figures & statistics, charts and recommendations. This report can only be practically used if it is made clear and concise so as to be understood by decision makers who may not have IT or technical knowledge. Hence, after processing and analyzing the big data, preparing the output is crucial. Useful insights and its concomitant recommendations should be clearly presented and passed on to the right people at the right time.
Analytics tools have built in chart and diagram generator which can help you communicate the conclusions and recommendations you have. Simple graphics also play a huge role in bridging communication gap.
About the Author, Micah de Jesus
Micah de Jesus is a Digital Marketing Professional and a data / cybersecurity news junkie. She works as the Managing Director of GrowthScout SEO Services, a digital marketing firm and a Contributing Editor for INOC – NOC Center, The Partnership UK and Solus Multi Factor Authentication.