You can’t pull up an industry newsletter, report or magazine without seeing a slew of articles on
Big Data, yet there is still a lot of confusion in the market on what Big Data really is and how it will impact the organization. To many organizations, Big Data translates to big costs and complexity. However, the evolution of modern analytics platforms is dispelling these preconceived notions.
The Storage Factor
Many organizations are struggling to gain access to the data needed for advanced insights and retaining and analyzing only a small percentage of their data. Historically, the high cost of resources needed to retain data, such as storage, have made it prohibitive to keep data needed for future analytics. Today, with the availability of technologies able to run on low-cost commodity hardware we are at the tipping point of being able to easily unlock insights found across the full spectrum of an organization’s data. Being able to access previously unreachable data sets, such as social media, demographics, weather and other unstructured sources, allows for the creation of analytics that can quickly move organizations ahead of their competition in the market place.
The Data Processing Factor
Storing large amounts of data effectively is just part of the complexity with advanced analytics needs. To more accurately target customers and reduce organizational costs, big data solutions also need to provide an effective data processing platform to Data Scientists. Modern analytics platforms have evolved to allow complex algorithms to be run in a distributed nature across hundreds of low-cost commodity servers containing petabytes of data, and have the ability to return business insights to questions that may have been previously unanswerable.
Modern Analytics Platforms: The Big Data Enabler
Big Data’s momentum is unstoppable because technologies today are making it simpler and more affordable. The Big Data market is still young and evolving quickly. While many organizations are still trying to define what Big Data means to them, modern analytics platforms are iterating through multiple major releases per year, and increasing its market penetration both in large and small enterprises. Even traditional software vendors are embracing the new Big Data paradigm by introducing their own implementation of Big Data technologies.
2014 will be a year of rapid change. Many organizations are looking to expand their business intelligence capabilities with a modern analytics platform, and the most successful organizations will integrate Big Data in a way that is transparent to their customers – and critical to business objectives.
If you are interested in exploring the impact of Big Data in your organization, contact BlueGranite today for a complimentary consultation.
