Your Handy Guide on Big Data for Businesses

Big data is the buzzword now, which serves as the fuel for the analytical applications of our times. When it comes to data analytics, it is not just the conventional approach. Still, data comes in huge volume from various sources into the mainline, and heavy analytical tools are used to analyze and derive actionable insights from these chunks of data. In-depth big data analysis can explain the hidden patterns of customer behavior and market trends, and businesses can largely benefit from big data and make use of it effectively for better results.

 As it is largely evident everywhere around, developments in big data technologies have now unlocked huge possibilities for information-driven businesses. Before the big data era, data analytics and BI were largely limited to the usage of structured data, which can be stored in limited capacity relational databases and structured data warehouses. Examples are financial records and transactional data, which come in highly structured formats. However, there was a lot of potential for the data from various other sources too, but for the reason that these may not fit in well to the relational database model, all of it left unused. However, this is not the case anymore as big data can incorporate data in all forms and formats.

Big data applications can be used to manage, process, and analyze various types of data. Databases now available to business enterprises include customer databases, email information, internet records, images, log files, social media posts, sensor-induced data, medical data, and a lot more.

The big data scenario

Business organizations and industries across the globe are now increasingly trying to benefit from all these data stores, which help to drive more reliable business strategies. Big data analysis also helps in decision-making and getting future insights. A survey of business executives in IT from many big companies showed that about 91.9% of them were trying to accelerate the pace of their investments in big data and other related initiatives, whereas 96% of them already reported some successful outcomes from those projects.

However, many of the top-line blue-chip firms are still striving to optimize their business results out of the big data environments. It is said that nearly about 39% of the participants of the above survey reported that their organizations are considering enterprise data as a valuable business asset, and about 24% only said that they follow a data-driven culture in their organization as per the report on an annual survey which was published in 2021.

In order to help the small and large companies to derive more value from the data flowing into their system from various sources, big data has to be viewed from a different perspective. You need to understand the concept of big data in terms of its business benefits, challenges, and big data best practices to gain the most out of it. You can find many examples of successful big data use cases and an overview of big data as a technological specialty. This guide will further try to uncover the importance of big data in business with some such use cases. To enable big data, however, you need to make use of a good database too, which can handle all types of structured and unstructured data. You may consult the RemoteDBA.com admins to identify the apt database for your business applications. 

The importance of big data in business

Before we used to utilize big data platforms for business, there were many organizations that used only a small portion of their enterprise data for analytical applications and organizational decision-making. The rest of the data used often go into the trash, known as dark data, which was processed and stored but not used any further. Then came better management of big data, which enabled modern-day businesses to use all types of data as valuable assets for operations.

Succeeding in doing so expanded the tools and methods for data analytics, which the companies used to derive better business values. Big data now created a lot of opportunities in terms of machine learning, data mining, predictive analytics, data mining, and various other data sciences specialties for advanced analytics. By using all these disciplines, big data applications now help businesses understand the market and their customers better, identify the operational challenges and identify all fraudulent transactions to better manage supply chains, finances, and daily operations.

If you manage it well, end results of big data applications can ensure better marketing and advertising campaigns, enhance the business processes, increase overall revenue, cut short costs, and ensure better strategic planning of business administration. All these will lead to more results and enhanced ROI as competitive advantages for businesses over their competitors. Adding to it, big data can also contribute to many breakthroughs in healthcare applications, scientific research, IoT enablement, smart cities, autonomous vehicles, law enforcement, defense applications, government’s public administration fields, etc.

Different types of business-relevant big data

Big data encompass various data types. Generally, big data systems are not used for transactional processing, but these can often store the transactions, records of customer info, financial data, stock data, and many other structured data forms for analytical purposes. However, big data can go far beyond the reporting and BI applications that conventional stores usually enable.

What distinguishes big data from conventional data stores is semi-structured and unstructured data support. Semi-structured data is like activity logs, server applications, data from IoT smart home devices, industrial machines, etc. As we have seen above, relational databases will not be able to accommodate these types of data like document texts, emails, images, survey responses, transcripts of call center interactions, audio/video files, etc.

Here are some major big data advantages in business

• To get a 360-degree view of the market and customer behavior to optimize marketing and customer services.

• Better customer acquisition and customer retention can be enabled by knowing the customer needs and priorities well.

• Enabling fraud prevention and cybersecurity by identifying suspicious transactions and threats to security.

• Improve business forecasts, optimize product pricing, and contribute positively to better operational efficiency.

• Develop personalization and recommendations for streaming services, business websites, and online advertising.

• Analyzing unstructured data in the form of text, images, videos, and audio to better analyze customer sentiment for delivering appropriate advertising content.

Data diversity is increasing day by day, and so big data is finding new ways to positively impact business administration by putting forth many unique and advanced ways of data management and data-driven business insights.