What is Big Data & Why Does It Matter?

The term Big data was known by enterprises since the 1950s. Although the term wasn’t explicitly used during those times, the processes used by businesses were similar.

The old-fashioned methods to analyze large chunks of data were cumbersome & sophisticated. In addition to that, many mistakes were committed during the data analysis & the entire process was painstakingly slow. This is where Big data analytics comes into the picture. With the advancement of technologies, life became convenient & various business activities got simpler. Similarly, big data in business became simpler, faster & more reliable. Let us know about the big data definition & its importance.

What is Big Data?

The term Big Data was introduced by Roger Mougalas. It refers to huge data sets that are analyzed with computational software. The results of the analysis reveal data patterns, trends & associations.

For a business, these patterns & trends are generally related to human behavior & interactions. Companies can easily use these results to improve their products & services. Additionally, they can leverage Big data analytics to enhance in-house productivity & operational efficiencies.

Large amounts of data are generated by companies & users daily. This data is valuable to businesses pertaining to various industries like retail, banking, IT services, eCommerce & more. Companies use big data analytics to analyze the data quickly & get actionable data. This data can be leveraged to drive business growth.

Big data is an amalgamation of:

Structured Data – can be categorized into domains like age, height & gender

Unstructured Data – cannot be analyzed in a relational database. For example - videos, Facebook posts & tweets.

Both types of data are analyzed meticulously with the help of cutting-edge computational software to extract actionable information. The main purpose of Big Data analytics is to ensure accuracy, readability & reliability of data.

Importance of Big Data for Businesses

Big data has applications across various businesses & industries. It helps enterprises by providing actionable data such as detailed customer profiles for retailers, real-time media content usage for OTT platforms & many more. Let’s look at a simple yet valuable timeline of Big Data processes i.e from data generation to consumption.

Data Generation – Data Generated by digital activity such as emails, payments, social media posts, photos, call records, IoT devices & much more. Enterprises generate data via hardware & software. 

Data Management – The data generated is managed in data centres, cloud, end devices, or in corporate data centres. The crucial part i.e Data analysis is done with the help of Business intelligence tools during Data management. It is then managed via storage, processing, aggregation & integration methods. This is how actionable data is derived.

Product Development – The actionable data is used by enterprises to develop new & improved services for consumers.

Data Consumption – The products & services developed with the help of Big data analytics is used by consumers that result in improved sales, revenue & customer satisfaction.

The entire process might look a bit complicated. But, the exciting part is maximum productivity, excellent sales & robust business practices. This is why Big data is very important for small & large organizations who want to scale their operations.

Advantages of Big Data

Here are a few advantages of Big Data Analytics that might nudge businesses to adopt it:

It is cost-effective.

It dramatically increases operational efficiencies.

Empowers small businesses to compete with large ones.

Data insights help companies to focus on local preferences.

Maximizes Sales & Improves customer loyalty.

This is what Big Data is all about! It helps businesses to transform their marketing strategies by leveraging actionable data. ARSR holds expertise in Big Data-based processes & offers services such as Big Data Strategy, Big Data on Cloud, Big Data Labs & Big Data on AWS.