As per Oxford English Dictionary, Big Data is “data of a very large size, typically to the extent that its manipulation and management present logistical challenges”. Big Data refers to technologies and initiatives that involve data that is too diverse, fast-changing, or massive for conventional technologies, skills, and infrastructure to address efficiently. But nowadays with the help of new technologies, it is very easy to realize the value of Big data, for example, to identify shopping behavioral trends of customers to improve stockage and pricing of the items. Government processes also get benefits and banking institutions are capturing data on customer interaction to model risk and fraud.
What is Big Data?
Big Data is a term that is concerned with the collection of huge data associated with characteristics like large variety, more velocity along with increased volume simply known as 3 Vs. There are mainly three types of Big Data – Structured data, Unstructured data, and Semi-structured data. This voluminous structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data is processed to gather useful insights for subsequently making effective business decisions, etc.
Use of Big Data:
Big Data is used for many things but some of the main usage purposes are as follows:
- Bag Data enables you to gather information about customers and their experience, then eventually helps you to align it properly.
- Helps in maintaining the predictive failures beforehand by analyzing the problems and provides with their potential solutions.
- Big Data is also useful for companies to anticipate customer demand, roll out new plans, test markets, etc.
- Big Data is very useful in assessing predictive failures by analyzing various indicators such as unstructured data, error messages, log entries, engine temperature, etc.
- Big Data is also very efficient in maintaining operational functions along with anticipating future demands of the customers, current market demands thus providing proper results.
Benefits of Big Data in IT Sectors:
- Many old IT companies are fully dependent on big data in order to modernize their outdated mainframes by identifying the root causes of failures and issues in real-time and antiquated code bases. Many organizations are replacing their traditional system with open-source platforms like Hadoop.
- Most big data solutions are based on Hadoop, which allows designs to scale up from a single machine to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage, moreover, it is a “free” open source platform, allowing minimizing capital investment for an organization in acquiring new platforms.
- With the help of big data technologies IT companies are able to process third-party data fast, which is often hard to understand at once by having inherently high horsepower and parallelized working of platforms.
Benefits of Big Data in Business:
- Data quality has a direct impact on business process efficiency. In purchase to pay process, poor quality vendor data can cause missing purchase contracts or pricing information which can lead to delays in procuring vital goods. Many companies use big data solutions or algorithms to simply do what they have already been doing, so that there is no data loss moreover if we run the algorithm against the data set, the result might be the list of individual who exhibits attributes of fraudulent behavior.
- In order to cash process, incomplete or inaccurate credit limits or pricing information can lead to overall customer service loss or reduce revenue or may increase service cost, with the help of big data technologies and the ability to run various algorithms more quickly, the data can be updated at regular intervals throughout the day.
- The systematic analysis of data or data profiling is used to assess the overall health of the data which leads to proper business decisions in accordance with the present situation because sometimes inaccurate data results in incorrect management, which means business decisions are based on incorrect information. For example, the more one can understand customers’ complex relationships, preferences, and interaction history with the company, the more relevant and timely business outreach.
Benefits of Big Data in Enterprise :
- Big data might allow a company to collect trillions or billions of real-time data points on its products, resources, or customers- and then repackage the data instantaneously to optimize the customer experience.
- The speed at which data is updated using big data technologies allows enterprises to more quickly and accurately respond to customer demands. For example, MetLife used MongoDB to quickly consolidate customer information over 70 different sources and provide a single, rapidly-updated view
- Big data can help enterprises to act more nimbly allowing them to adapt to changes faster than their competitors.
Benefits of Big Data in Other Areas:
- Big Data technologies are used to predict the ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ decisions made on the shares of different companies for the customers.
- Hospitals are analyzing medical data and records to predict those patients that are likely to seek re-admission within a few months of discharge. The hospital can avoid costly stays for patients in the hospital.
- Search-Engine retrieves lots of Data from different databases in a fraction of a second using big data technologies. For example, Google uses the MapReduce algorithm to search for a given query. MapReduce divides the task into small parts and assigns those parts to many computers connected over the network, and collects the result to form the final result.
- Financial Services organizations are using big data for data mining about customer interactions to slice and dice their users into finely tuned segments, this will help in creating increasingly relevant and sophisticated offers.
- Insurance companies are using Big Data analysis to see which home insurance applications can be immediately processed, and which ones need a validating in-person visit from an agent.
- Web-based businesses are developing information products that combine data gathered from customers to offer more appealing recommendations and more successful coupon programs.