How to Benefit from Big Data

Big Data has become integral in the strategies for big businesses in the year ahead. In 2012, a study showed that 90% of the world’s data had been created in the last two years. But how do you use this wealth of information to benefit your business?

Big data allows for everything to be measured and tracked, each variable – no matter how seemingly minute is collected and that means that all types of correlations, relationships and insights are more effectively and efficiently integrated into your business.

The analysis that big data provides could have a giant effect on your business. It can help with increased market awareness or it could help open up new avenues, such as new services to offer customers.

Big data has the ability to transform business, to encourage it to move quicker and more efficiently through the enhanced ability to spot patterns and identify potential relationships that we wouldn’t have seen before.

In a world increasingly concerned with global warming there is a necessity on businesses to reduce greenhouse emissions and big data goes a long way to help this. Big data can help create more energy efficient systems. Web Host memset have been using big data for two and a half years now and in that time they have managed to reduce the average power consumption of one of their units from 26 watts to 3.7 watts.

Although it is the buzz word in business circles at the moment, big data is incredibly cheap to work with. Teams can be trained to deal with large sets of data while the hardware needed to do this is inexpensive. Especially when many services are delivered via the cloud via virtual servers further reducing the maintenance and repair costs.

Big data can also help prevent company loses by being able to detect even the most sophisticated financial fraud. Businesses are now able to shift through massive volumes of data to uncover hidden patterns and trends that can point to criminal fraud.

This high powered analytical framework can also help businesses calculate risk more accurately and to their benefit and can also be used to pull off high value marketing campaigns more effectively. It allows teams to test and validate a greater number of variables for their campaigns.

Jon Smith is an e-Marketing Specialist for Insight UK a leading provider of IT hardware, services and solutions including the cloud delivery platform, smartCLOUD.