CIO STORY
CIO STORY
By VK Uday
O
ver the past several years,
Big Data has become a very
significant term in the business
world. Big Data typically refers to the
large amounts of structures, as well
as unstructured data that pertain to
a company’s day-to-day operations.
Different organizations handle their data
in different ways. More often than not,
it is not the amount of data that matters,
rather it is how efficiently it is handled
and what the organization makes out of it
that finds value.
Companies analyse Big Data for
insights that can help them make
informed decisions to improve their
business prospects. The different
advantages of Big Data analysis apply
to cost reductions, time reductions, new
product development, and smart decision
making. This translates to almost real-
time discovery of issues, failures and
defects. In addition to that, it also enables
companies to define new initiatives and
re-evaluate existing strategies to examine
how they can transform their businesses.
It is clear that Big Data is not just a
single technology. Instead, it is a trend
that covers many areas of business and
technology, and is characterised by
volume and variety that is much too
great. This great plethora of information
finds its use across several industries.
Banks use Big Data to keep a check
on any sort of fraudulent behaviour.
While tending to the requirements of
their customers, it is equally important
for banks to ensure that customers
adhere to the rules and regulations
laid out by the banking system. Using
Big Data, health care providers are
capable of maintaining patient records
and their treatment itinerary, including
prescription details, with utmost
transparency. The government agencies
use the obtained data to keep a check
on traffic congestions and prevention of
crimes. Schools make use of Big Data to
keep a track record of the performance
of the students. Students who are not
performing as per expectations can be
identified and necessary measures can
be taken to ensure that adequate progress
is made. Manufacturing businesses
improve their profitability and stay
ahead of competition by minimizing
their wastes during production. They
achieve this by taking into account
insights achieved through Big Data
which helps them make better decisions
and solve problems faster. Similarly, oil
and gas companies make safer drilling
decisions by analysing the data obtained
from sensors installed in their drilling
equipment.
Big Data is generally characterised
by three primary features: volume,
velocity and variety. Just about a decade
ago, the amount of data that was dealt
with during any business process was
at least a hundredth lesser than what is
being dealt with in the current times.
This is expected to grow exponentially
as more and more sensors are being
embedded into instruments and devices
of daily use. This naturally implies
that there is going to be a surge in the
amount of data obtained, the data being
updated on a very frequent basis. On
that note, it is interesting to understand
that the transfer rate of data has gone
up to the likes of millions of events
per second. For example, stock trading
algorithms that work on a high frequency
basis reflect market changes within
microseconds. Online gaming systems
have the capability to support millions
of concurrent users wherein each user
churns out multiple inputs per second.
All said, if you thought all of this data
is just confined to numbers, dates and
strings, you are mistaken. This is just a
tiny portion of what form Big Data can
be in. Big Data can be of various types
including geospatial data, 3D data, audio,
video, or even unstructured text, which
includes log files and social media. As
is clear from here, traditional database
systems which were practical for
handling smaller volumes of structured
data, while operating on a single server
have been phased out. In their place, Big
Data databases have been introduced to
work in tandem with applications that
serve large volumes of users. MongoDB
is one such database that is adept at
handling millions of users and their data
at the same time.
So how are big enterprises leveraging
the advantages of Big Data to improve
the agility of their business strategies?
How are they ensuring that through the
application of Big Data they are able
to achieve their revenue targets and
also attain their business goals? Big
Data plays an active role in helping an
organization build new applications that
are appropriately based on their customer
behaviour. Data points on the company’s
products, resources, or customers are
provided on a real-time basis so that the
company can have a clear understanding
of what the current status of the business
is, and take quick, strongly-based
decisions. These new applications are
built with the sole purpose of optimizing
customer experience or resource
utilization. This kind of functioning
is well exhibited in a major city in the
US which has been using MongoDB to
cut down on its crime rate and improve
municipal services. This is successfully
undertaken through the collection
and analysis of geospatial data on a
real-time basis, from over 30 different
departments.
While finding use in building new
applications, Big Data also exhibits
several advantages in improving the
effectiveness and bringing down the
cost of existing applications. Big Data
does so by replacing high end legacy
systems, which have been heavily
customized, with a standard solution
that runs on commodity hardware. This
coupled with the fact that there are
multiple Big Data technologies that are
open source, the cost reduction is highly
significant. There is also the added
advantage that implementation of Big
Data technologies into the core system
helps keep the organization’s application
under better compliance with regulatory
requirements.
As mentioned earlier, Big Data
helps organizations take better and
quicker decisions to stay at the edge of
competition. This in turn helps to quickly
adapt to revolutionary technology or
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innovative methods much faster than
what their competitors can. This is
clearly demonstrated in the case of a
Human Capital Management solution
provider whom MongoDB enabled to
build mobile applications that integrated
data from a wide variety of disparate
sources. One of the most important
advantages of Big Data is its power to
build a loyal customer base. This is quite
obviously through the large volumes of
data that is shared with the organization,
and the rate at which this data keeps
getting updated. This helps businesses
keep an active watch on customer
behaviour and keep themselves updated
on the rise in demand, and respond
actively. All of these processes happen
on a near real-time basis. MetLife, one
of the leading global insurance providers
testifies to having been able to quickly
consolidate customer information from
over 70 different sources after updating
their database to the MongoDB database.
What’s in for Big Data in the coming
years? Here’s the bombshell – the Big
Data market is expected to hit the $50B
mark by the year 2019 according to
analysts. The current stage at which
Big Data is in is only its infancy as
revealed by the market trends studies.
It is common knowledge that as digital
transformation grows, the reliance
on new softwares and architectures
will also experience a hike in parallel.
Since softwares are very crucial for
driving the very core of any business,
it is absolutely essential that these
applications are managed, monitored,
and troubleshooting is carried out on
a real-time basis. And that is where
Big Data comes in – all the necessary
information available on a real-time basis
with full visibility and agility. If this is
what businesses are doing right now,
expect this trend to multiply manifold in
the years to come! CS
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