Big data Analytics-the NEW BUZZ in the Air

The rise of the digital age brought with it unique challenges for businesses as they ventured into the virtual frontier of the internet. One of the challenges which quickly made itself apparent was the need for understanding who your online audience was. Traditional means of audience measurement were not capable of identifying digital audience, giving way to the rise of the web analytics industry. The web analytics marketplace has evolved rapidly as products and methodologies have come and gone, born of innovation, then either evolving through acquisition or dying of irrelevance.

Big data is being generated by everything around us at all times. Every digital process and social media exchange produces it. Systems, sensors and mobile devices transmit it. Big data is arriving from multiple sources at an alarming velocity, volume and variety. To extract meaningful value from big data, you need optimal processing power, analytics capabilities and skills. Think Big Analytics talks about the tools and technology including, MongoDB, Cassandra, HBase, Spark, YARN, Memcached, Kafka and Flume.

Big data is changing the way people within organizations work together. It is creating a culture in which business and IT leaders must join forces to realize value from all data. Insights from big data can enable all employees to make better decisions—deepening customer engagement, optimizing operations, preventing threats and fraud, and capitalizing on new sources of revenue. But escalating demand for insights requires a fundamentally new approach to architecture, tools and practices.

Big Data - Competitive advantage: Data is emerging as the world’s newest resource for competitive advantage.

Big Data - Decision Making: Decision making is moving from the elite few to the empowered many.

Big Data - Value of Big Data: As the value of data continues to grow, current systems won’t keep pace.

New skills are needed to fully harness the power of big data. The emerging role of data scientist is meant to fill that skills gap. While big data can provide significant value, it also presents significant risk. Organizations must be proactive about privacy, security and governance to ensure all data and insights are protected and secure. From data-driven marketing and ad targeting to the connected car, big data is fueling product innovation and new revenue opportunities for many organizations.

To gain the competitive advantage that big data holds; you need to infuse analytics everywhere, make speed a differentiator, and exploit value in all types of data. This requires an infrastructure that can manage and process exploding volumes of structured and unstructured data—in motion as well as at rest—and protect data privacy and security.