We generate 2.8 trillion gigabytes of data a year, globally. By 2020, that number will balloon to 40 trillion gigabytes per year. Is your organization prepared?
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Executive Summary
Big data. Its a deceptively simple term that describes a massively complex problem: Our ability to generate data is light-years ahead of our ability to analyze it, let alone turn that analysis into actionable information. But, the companies that manage to solve this puzzle will reap enormous rewards in myriad areas operational efficiencies, more rigorous governance, industry insight, and market leadership, to name a few. This IT Brief Beginners Guide outlines the 3 Key Components needed to Successfully harness Big Data.
Key Takeaways:
Harness Big Data Manage Information Analyze High-Perfornce Deploy Big Data Analytics
significantly ahead of their peers in financial terms described their organization as having a well-defined data strategy more than four times the figure for respondents who said they are on par with their peers in financial terms.
Source: EM
Your big data strategy should factor in three key components: information management, high-performance analytics, and flexible deployment. Keeping these factors in mind will guide you toward a big data initiative that results in timely access to valuable, actionable information.
Best Practice: Improve the quality of your data Capturing and storing data is a challenge most companies have mastered were drowning in it. The organization of data requires a rigorous focus on data quality. After all, why bother analyzing low-quality data? A long-time mantra in the database world garbage in, garbage out is no less relevant in todays world of big data.
Big Data Beginners Guide: The Big Data Holy Grail
Complete, accurate, and consistent data is key. Best Practice: Foster a data-driven culture Big data isnt an IT initiative, its a business initiative across departments, from top to bottom. So, its important to think of big data as an ongoing, company-wide competency, rather than a series of short-term, confined IT projects. Database administrators have traditionally been the only people who manage data. However, C-level executives, marketing teams, operations mangers, etc. All need to make decisions based on data that is accessible across departments.
Because big data implementations deal with cumbersome data sets, its important for analysis solutions to be flexible. You also dont want to tie data to a particular analytical need. Best Practice: Focus on late binding for data analysis Most data analysis uses an early binding approach, where data is fit into a specific schema and bound to business rules at the outset. This is possible for simple, well-defined, structured data. But, if youre searching free text, machinegenerated data, or diverse data sets, it isnt practical, or even sometimes possible, to understand and model the data at the early stages. And, in most cases, you dont want to because early binding can irrevocably alter the data, tailoring it for a specific set of analytics . If the organization needs to slice and dice the data for different uses, they must repeatedly rebuild the models. Best Practice: Explore cloud options Cloud computing can be a perfect fit for big data implementations, especially for companies struggling with storage budgets. Cloud computing also gives companies access to a valuable asset: third-party data. Combining internal data with outside data, such as financial
Best Practice: Know what business goals your data will support Do not make the mistake of framing big data as a technology problem. First and foremost, its a business problem. Thus, your big data strategy does not start with technology; it starts with the business problems youre trying to solve. Dont go looking for answers when you dont know the questions. Best Practice: Invest in Staffing The Economist Intelligence Unit study reported 41 percent of survey respondents as saying that a lack of skilled staff hampers their attempts to
market data, weather data, and aggregated industryspecific data, can give organizations a new level of insight and identity. Think of it as looking at the companys data in the context of its specific industry, or even a global economy a view that shows both the forest and the trees, so to speak.
Conclusion
Big data is not just a buzzword. A recent Gartner study indicates that 80 percent of the worlds data is unstructured, and therefore largely untapped. Thus, many companies are making missioncritical decisions based on only 20 percent of their data. Companies that can start to access their unstructured data, and layer in third-party data, and do it all at the speed of business will be able to say they really treat their hard-won data as an asset, not just something they store and wish they could use. Big data is fraught with complexity and that complexity is only going to grow. However, the potential rewards are so great, big data is a buzzword your company ignores at its own peril.
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