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Extreme Data: Businesses Seek Competitive Advantage With Big Data Analytics
Increasingly organizations are collecting large amounts of data. Big Data is one tool that has become available to help organizations turn their data to their advantage.
Forrester Research estimates that enterprise data is growing annually at a rate of 40 to 50 percent, but organizations are only collecting and storing 25 to 30 percent of that data, and only 5 percent of all data that organizations do collect is actually being used and analyzed. Big Data provides advantages and incentives to organizations to collect more and do more with the data that gets collected.
Brian Hopkins, principal analyst at Forrester Research, says that there are three components that define Big data:
- Analysis — the technology and techniques needed to sift through and decipher trends from your data
- Extreme — large volumes, rapidly changing or accumulating, huge variety, and big variability
- Value — the availability of reasonably priced solutions
The most commonly cited benefit of Big Data technology is competitive advantage — staying ahead of the competition. More specifically, business benefits that result from using Big Data include:
- Big Data can unlock meaning from data that was previously hidden.
- Big Data can bring greater accuracy to a wide range of business metrics, enabling better decision making.
- Big Data allows for very granular segmentation of data, allowing businesses to better customize their products and services to the needs of specific markets.
- Big Data allows organizations model their business to help them target their next generation of products and services.
But while the hype around Big Data is high, and the benefits of its use are real, there are also potential issues, two of which are privacy and security. John Kindervag, Senior Analyst for Security and Risk Management at Forrester, summarized the findings of another Forrester study that found that “as organizations aggregate more and more data, they need to be aware that much of that data could be financial, personal, and other types of sensitive data that are subject to global laws and regulations. In addition, security and risk professionals need to be aware of the security issues surrounding big data so they can take an active role early in these initiatives. “
