Big data is the new oil and gold.
Whether you’re a small business or a commercial enterprise looking to scale, no company can ignore the ramifications of big data. In fact, with the rapid deployment of applications leveraged on big data, investing in this technology is a matter of survival for any business.
How big is big data?
The sheer size of big data alone and its impact on giant industries like agriculture, manufacturing, supply chain management, and finance, demonstrate how important it is to businesses.
Tech Jury projects that by 2020, the world will have produced approximately 40 zettabytes of data. That’s 40 trillion gigabytes – a combination of consumer data, Google searches, business to business transactions, crypto trading, machine vision, and every other source of raw data there is on the planet. So how is all this data being monetized?
Data-driven industries
Big data analytics is the backbone of the so-called “Industrialization 4.0.” Most of the innovations that are upending industries like decentralized machine learning, distributed ledger technologies, the Internet of Things, and predictive analytics all derive and contribute to the data-driven innovation that is happening across industries right now.
With a compound annual growth rate of 10.48%, big data analytics is inarguably one of the most lucrative and impactful innovations disrupting industries across the globe. In Maryville University’s post for business data analytics graduates they identify the top five industries that will be disrupted by business data analytics as professional services, the federal and central government, discrete manufacturing, banking, and process manufacturing. The educational institution also adds that by 2020, the analytics market in the U.S. will be worth a whopping $95 billion, while worldwide, it will be worth approximately $203 billion.
As more applications leverage the analytics generated by businesses including even Conflict free Data Types and decentralized data distribution, big data will continue to move forward at a rapid pace.
The use of big data analytics gives businesses a competitive advantage in saving money, product development, understanding market conditions, and improving efficiency. Smart agriculture leverages big data for precision agriculture – navigating food production through climate data, market prices, and soil and seed health. Big data in supply chain management increases visibility, traceability, and transparency while minimizing risks and transport costs.
TechRepublic highlights augmented analytics and artificial intelligence as today’s top applications of big data and analytics. Around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day and augmented analytics enables companies to focus on the strategic use and preparation of data analysis machine learning and natural language processing.
Meanwhile, 73% of companies are currently investing in DataOps – a combination of DevOps in software engineering and data analytics. This technology allows companies to build, develop, and release software and support it at a breakneck pace with increased efficiency and foresight.
Cascade to small businesses
While most think that big data analytics is reserved for giant, tech-driven companies, recent advances and innovations are cascading the technology to small and medium businesses without the associated costs of ICT infrastructures.
Both Google’s MapReduce paper and Yahoo’s Hadoop project, including similar undertakings, have used this process. Reducing costs and increasing efficiency through cloud storage and computing has made big data analytics more accessible. This has given small businesses unprecedented access to scaling and utilizing data-driven innovations.
The launch of a number of big data tools in marketing has made sentiment analysis for smaller brands not only possible but less costly. Retailers can now optimize their stocks based on predictive models – based on data taken from their own business as well as from the market in which they participate.
As more industries adopt big data and integrate its applications to achieve competitive advantages, it will become clearer that the adoption of this technology is, in fact, a matter of commercial survival.
