Your pool of big data is a gold mine of actionable insights – only if it’s managed efficiently.
By Huzefa Motiwala
Big data is a big deal for enterprises today. Every second, businesses generate a huge amount of data. This is only going to get bigger- both in significance and volume. By extracting actionable insights, CXOs can monetize a mine of insights. While the volume and variety of data continue to rise, so does your opportunity to find value in data. Many enterprises are working on a comprehensive framework to exploit their data.
Enterprises are gradually realizing that the value of big data lies in the insights that businesses can draw from it, rather than in the information itself. As a result, business intelligence and analytics are emerging as priorities for the C-suite. To support this, a recent study by research firm IDC states that 50.6% of Asia Pacific enterprises want to monetise their data in the next 18 months.
Enterprises must assess their data and determine how to optimise it to generate the most value out of this data. A few businesses have managed to make progress at a strategic level by analysing the structured and unstructured data to gain insights that guide decision-making. Here are three guidelines you can follow to monetise your data:
Capture Data Holistically
This means capturing all the data collected from the Edge to the cloud. Data produced on edge and mobile devices can contain content of exceptional value; it can be as valuable as information stored in virtualized servers, a corporate cloud and everything in between. Enterprises need to ensure they take necessary steps to align policy driven rules with deep retention that further reduces cost, footprint, risk and administrative overhead. With an efficient management system, you can use a single, deduplicated index across all enterprise data. This will not only facilitate better control of applications, processes and data workflow while delivering real time information at your fingertips, but will also result in better productivity, improved collaboration and smarter decision making.
Deliver Self Service Access
In other words, make relevant data available to respective teams. Workers across your organisation will find value in different types of data. For instance, the sales department may need information on pricing trends every quarter, while the operations team may benefit from data on facility usage. Meanwhile, an HR person may want details on workplace satisfaction. Needless to say, all the required data resides in your archived information, but cannot be useful unless it can be searched and found. A good data management solution must be able to create several insights using the same data and provide them at your fingertips without having you making a call to the helpdesk. Empowering your teams will help them quickly discover information, access and analyse it. This will maximise the workforce productivity by providing them with transformational business insight into the data that was otherwise just stored safely in a vault.
Automate the Data Lifecycle
Along with the insights, the problem of data explosion also implies that there are volumes upon volumes of stored content which is not valuable to the business. Enterprises must assess the full data lifecycle right from its creation through to its retirement. Since managing sheer volumes of data can get challenging over a period of time, automation of the data lifecycle can help go a long way to classify, organise, retain and delete information. This will let you streamline the entire information management lifecycle. Such solutions not only help you to automate records retention, but also help you manage data more strategically for improved compliance and litigation readiness.
There is no ‘one right way’ to monetise data as it depends entirely on your business and the outcome required. Data is the new gold and needs some serious mining to extract its benefits. When the revenue starts paying off, you’ll see why it is worth the effort!
The author is director, systems engineering, India (SAARC), Commvault.
