Big data analytics examines large amounts of data to uncover hidden patterns, correlations and other insights. With today’s technology, it’s possible to analyze your data and get answers from it almost immediately – an effort that’s slower and less efficient with more traditional business intelligence solutions.
So, What exactly is Big Data?
Big data is a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing application software is inadequate to deal with them. Big data challenges include capturing data, data storage, data analysis, search, sharing, transfer, visualization, querying, updating and information privacy.
Why is Big Data Analytics Important?
Big data analytics helps organizations harness their data and use it to identify new opportunities. That, in turn, leads to smarter business moves, more efficient operations, higher profits and happier customers. In his report Big Data in Big Companies, IIA Director of Research Tom Davenport interviewed more than 50 businesses to understand how they used big data. He found they got value in the following ways:
Cost reduction
Big data technologies such as cloud-based analytics bring significant cost advantages when it comes to storing large amounts of data – plus they can identify more efficient ways of doing business.
Faster, better decision making
With the speed of in-memory analytics, combined with the ability to analyze new sources of data, businesses are able to analyze information immediately – and make decisions based on what they’ve learned.
With the ability to gauge customer needs and satisfaction through analytics comes the power to give customers what they want. Davenport points out that with big data analytics, more companies are creating new products to meet customers’ needs.
What Challenges does it face?
Potential pitfalls that can trip up organizations on big data analytics initiatives include a lack of internal analytics skills and the high cost of hiring experienced data scientists and data engineers to fill the gaps.
The amount of data that's typically involved, and its variety, can cause data management issues in areas including data quality, consistency and governance; also, data silos can result from the use of different platforms and data stores in a big data architecture. In addition, integrating Hadoop, Spark and other big data tools into a cohesive architecture that meets an organization's big data analytics needs is a challenging proposition for many IT and analytics teams, which have to identify the right mix of technologies and then put the pieces together.
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