By Sahil Chawla, Co-Founder & CEO, Tsecond
Leveraging Big Data has propelled business profitability. How do you ask? Most businesses
today have become customer-centric and are focussed on enhancing customer relationships. How does one achieve it? A straightforward answer is through personalisation, bespoke offerings, and cost optimisation. All of this is possible by being able to capture data and convert it into useful information using advanced data science and analytics. Moreover, it helps businesses to make faster and more informed decisions.
However, while digitization becomes imperative for businesses to succeed, it produces
humongous amount of data daily going by the researched numbers. According to IDC, the
world will have produced 175 zettabytes of data by 2025, much of it generated in edge
environments. Fortunately today, technology can allow you to analyze massive amounts of
data from different sources more quicker and more efficiently. You can get immediate reports and answers to help drive business growth. Using lesser effort and cost, you can now conduct big data analytics more effectively.
Big data investments
As companies avidly pursue the promised benefits of big data and advanced analytics they
are required to make significant investments, from data warehouses to analytics programs.
The need is to invest substantially in data analytics talent and in big data IT capabilities.
Organizations can derive huge benefits with the right big data investments such as spending on analytics to gain competitive intelligence on future market conditions, target customers
more successfully, and optimize operations and supply chains. Efforts to democratize
usage by getting analytics tools in the hands of as many kinds of frontline employees as
possible will yield broad performance improvements.
Monetizing data
Data has proven to be very valuable for companies, at large, and the insights-driven out of
that data is even more valuable. Companies can adopt a two-pronged approach to monetize
their data. First by activating internal data to improve employee productivity and operations and secondly, by using the data to gather customer insights and increase revenue streams.
Organisations can adopt a data monetization strategy depending on their maturity level.
Different routes companies can adopt are:
Data as a Service: Sell aggregated anonymous data to companies or end customers.
For eg. Sell shopping data to retail companies for them to create better, personalised
offerings for customers.
Insights as a Service: Combine internal and external data to offer insights to a
company/industry for faster and more informed decision-making.
Platform as a Service: This model collects insights and makes them available in real-time through a cloud-based platform. Partners of the platform can access it anytime,
and if enriched with an API, they can even use it to create real-time-based triggers.
With these monetization techniques data has become mainstream for organisations. It has
become the cash trove, which when activated correctly can create immense value. Big data
advantages are industry agnostic – helping them to reduce operational costs, increase
productivity overall, explore newer avenues and generate revenues.
What lies ahead?
From mobile devices and video streaming to social media and IOT sensors, data is being
created everywhere. Today the volume, velocity, and variety of data are so surreal that the
term Big Data takes on an entirely new meaning, and it’s only increasing:
In 2020, people created 1.7 megabytes of data every second.
By the end of 2021, 74 zettabytes will make up the entire digital universe – a 25%
increase.
By 2025, 200+ zettabytes of data will be in cloud storage around the globe.
Big data isn’t just an important part of the future, it may be the future itself. The ability to
capture, manage, protect and analyze our massive amounts of unstructured or semi-
structured data is now considered to be the new competitive advantage – promising
companies’ powerful insights that enable smart, accelerated decision-making across their
organizations from product development to marketing to finance and more.
Sustainable big data solutions are the way forward
The exponential rise of digital information and a massive shift to cloud computing has taken a toll on the environment with an increased carbon footprint. Sustainability along with efficient use of resources is the way forward toward creating a healthy environment while continuing support for growing data needs.
Sustainable Mobile Storage solution that promises a massive reduction in Carbon Footprint by addressing major challenges like traditional infrastructure, excess energy consumption, and huge operational costs are picking up demand.
To conclude, businesses are rapidly becoming data-centric and are looking for simpler,
sustainable solutions for faster and more secure analysis. As digitization becomes inevitable we need to be cognizant of which technology to choose to our advantage. Identify, experiment with, and then aggressively invest in key trends that are important and aligned with one strategic business goal. Keeping abreast with the current trends is the key to data-
driven future