Reaping Big Benefits from Big Data

Modern technology can help you leverage big data like the world's leading companies without having the IT infrastructure of a fortune 100 company.

Ask Google '€œHow big is the internet?'. Google will tell you that they have indexed 200 terabytes of data as of 2014, which is estimated at .004 percent of the total Internet. In context, one terabyte is approximately 50,000 trees made into paper and printed; two terabytes would be an average academic research library; while ten terabytes represents the entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress.

Properly indexed and organized, the seemingly endless stream of documents, spreadsheets and proposals generated by your business can be leveraged into a valuable treasure trove of information, ready to be accessed at the click of a question.

“Given the right technology and web development partner, big data analysis can offer big benefits to savvy businesses.”

Enterprise search provides the power to collate overwhelming mountains of data into manageable queries in the same way that Google has organized searching the Internet. 200 terabytes sliced and diced in a quick second, filtered and sorted with your answer typically in page one's results.

You may be looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack, but you probably know more than you think you do. Suddenly, given the right tools, your search is not so hopeless. '€œShow me only gold needles next, '€œshow me gold needles in fields with between two to five haystacks, and so on and so forth. Leveraging big data tools can offer significant collaboration and efficiency benefits in your organization with immediate ROI.

Three keys to getting the most from big data analysis:

1. Speed - A big data solution needs to be quick. Faceting results quickly and accurately to parse raw information into answers is, of course, a must-have. Success, however, will ultimately be determined by how well your solution is able to ingest new information. The efficiency and speed at which your solution can add to, and build out, your data set when being fed your on-going stream of data will be the true measure of its value.
2. Simplicity - A big data solution for small business must be agile. Implementing a solution should take weeks, not years, for a company to begin using it. Additionally, the right solution should also be easy to use, with a minimum amount of training for proficiency, so that the benefits can be shared among the entire organization without the need for extensive IT support.
3. Flexibility - Large enterprises typically approach big data as an all-or-nothing proposition. This demands a complete re-tooling of existing systems, which in turn, imposes a heavy cost and time burden on the organization. Such an approach simply won't work for most businesses. Your custom big data solution needs to be built to accommodate the way that you already do business, not the other way around. It needs to adapt to your organization's processes and be flexible enough to support the way you currently work.

Given the right technology and web development partner, big data analysis can offer big benefits to savvy businesses. Unlocking valuable trends and metrics will give you insight into the who, how and why of your business and offer the opportunity to learn from your company's data in order to make smarter business decisions.