Today, more companies are employing Big Data initiatives in order to revolutionise their data strategy. In fact, a recent whitepaper from Martin Trisk, a Big Data Technology Enthusiast at Ataccama, outlines exactly how enterprises can benefit from implementing a Big Data platform.
What is Big Data?
Big Data represents a "new paradigm of data gathering, storing and processing," according to the report. In effect, it has the capacity to revolutionise or significantly improve many data-focused tasks, including data integration, transformation or analysis.
Employing Big Data initiatives or incorporating a Big Data platform thus enables companies to revolutionise their processes. In fact, enterprises can benefit from storing all of their information together, focusing on new data sources and types, or scaling their environment more easily.
Nevertheless, Big Data is not "a simple one-size-fits-all" for every organisation in every industry. Instead, the suitable solution heavily depends on a company's specific needs and requirements.
Why are companies employing Big Data initiatives?
More organisations are now striving to better understand their customers. As the report states, "it is not just about what to sell to whom, but also when and— with increasing importance—how."
With a Big Data platform, it is possible to query this information all at once, correlate it with other customers, and gain insights into customer behaviour. Nonethless, not every Big Data challenge needs to involve large volumes of data.
In fact, some companies are opting to handle the incoming data stream in real-time. For example, the City of Cape Town in South Africa optimises its public transportation system by tracking the number of actual passengers via their mobile devices.
Big Data challenges
Hadoop is the technology that powers most Big Data solutions, alongside applications from Hadoop's ecosystem. "Be it Hive, HBase or Flume, every single piece has its important role in this puzzle which cannot be easily replaced by other technology," the report states.
However, this fragmentation demands a vast amount of knowledge and skills, which can be challenging for new users. Furthermore, employing Big Data initiatives can also create problems in relation to data quality.
"You will suddenly lose control over the location or consistency of your information," according to the whitepaper. In addition to this, unstructured data can make data quality efforts even more challenging for unskilled users.
It is thus incredibly important to make it as easy as possible for all employees to use Big Data tools. In order to address this, Ataccama enables enterprises to leverage the benefits of Big Data without a steep learning curve.
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