(5-minute read)
To many businesses, big data is still a vague and ambiguous term that they hear thrown around on the internet and sometimes during sales pitch meetings with tech companies. For others, it is a daunting stepping stone, as part of their business development plans. So, what is big data? And why has it been gaining much attention in the digital sphere? Let’s take a closer look at the ecosystem that has been taking the tech world by storm.
Data: Your Number One Business Asset
In the age of digital transformation, data has become an indispensable asset for all businesses and sectors, just as vital as owning properties, making investments, and maintaining healthy cash flows. However, data that lacks organization and does not provide insights usually becomes burdensome, if not useless. What if this data exists in massive amounts and grows exponentially daily, requiring unique storage spaces and regulatory hubs to make sense of it? This is what big data is all about. As the name suggests, big data stands for large volumes of diverse data generated, collected, and processed at very high speeds. Think about supply chain companies. Not only do these companies need to cater to an ever-growing list of suppliers, but they are required to do so with the highest level of collaboration and data exchange. As a result, an endless influx of data is generated, handled, and stored daily. This data may be inundating; however, if organized and analyzed with the proper tools, patterns can be extracted, providing insights into operational efficiency and customer demand. For instance, the collected data from suppliers can be used to understand the demand patterns of customers in order to upsell certain products and services or to focus on marketing campaigns for other products. Similar patterns can be formulated to swiftly detect management risks like shipment delays and insufficient stock before they occur.
Big Data & Analytics: A Match Made in Heaven
Regardless of the size of your business, big data is the future. So, is your business ready to make the big move? Simply put, you need to upgrade your data storage space and technology infrastructure to meet the needs of the voluminous amounts of data your business will eventually collect, process, and store. Since it is humanly impossible to carry out these duties, pairing your big data strategy with tailored analytics software is your best option. Data analytics is implemented to help you organize, study, and draw intelligent insights from the constantly collected data while automating tasks that humans once exclusively did. Are you still wondering why you should make the significant shift? Here are some reasons to nudge you in the right direction:
1) Makes your organization more innovative and more efficient
Using big data and high-performance analytics, a copious amount of structured, unstructured, or semi-structured data can be organized and cleaned to make it readable so that insight can be extracted. For example, the time traditionally spent by data analysts to collect and manage customer information at retail shops, such as gender and age, is dramatically reduced. Intelligent video analytics solutions rely on data mining when organizing collected customer data at malls by recognizing the facial features of customers leaving the shops thanks to embedded AI and machine learning technologies, thereby providing businesses with a detailed report on customer satisfaction.
2) Reduces costs
When time is saved, costs are reduced. Big data paired with intelligent analytics cut operational costs and aid in risk management. For example, governments' expenses on traffic management like installing CCTVs to monitor roads and congestion or setting radar systems along highways to detect speeding cars can be eliminated by integrating camera systems with video analytics software. Vehicles in the cameras’ vicinity are detected, information such as the make and model, speed, etc., is made visible, and real-time alerts are sent to warn against traffic congestion or speeding cars.
3) Optimizes your business operations
Business operations are optimized when time and costs are reduced, allowing businesses and sectors to invest this time and money in other areas like product development. In addition, big data implemented with intelligent analytics can give you insights into your business and highlight areas that pose opportunities.
4) Personalizes marketing campaigns
Big data allows you to gather and organize large volumes of data received as direct feedback from customers or indirectly from customer behavior like, for example, peak visiting hours in a short time and speed. Analyzing such feedback gives you a better understanding of your customers’ needs and identifies business areas with opportunities. By having this knowledge, marketing campaigns can be personalized and attuned to your market demand.
Video Analytics: Two Birds with One Stone
Traditional surveillance is no longer viable for many businesses and sectors, given the high installation costs and the workforce needed for video monitoring. Part of the digital transformation has been for companies to move to intelligent surveillance systems that rely on machine learning and artificial intelligence for image recognition. By taking this leap, businesses not only heighten their security levels but also hop on the big data train and take advantage of the many benefits.
Video analytics companies like VEER transform unstructured data, i.e., data not arranged or stored in a known format, from video surveillance into actionable insights. This is done by relying on deep machine learning technology, which analyzes live videos that can identify car license plates, people’s faces, guns, unattended objects, and human emotion, in addition to many other customizable parameters. Not only does video analytics aid in automating image recognition, which eliminates the need for the workforce to monitor video footage, but it also organizes and classifies the vast volumes of data constantly being collected from cameras. Detailed reports such as the number and type of cars entering and exiting a business premise or the number and gender of people choosing to enter a particular store in a mall are thus generated using such software. The same technology can monitor large-scale businesses and sectors like airports, stadiums, and hospitals. Data patterns are developed and made visible by video analytics systems, which allow companies to achieve the highest levels of security while making informed decisions.
In conclusion, the move to big data is inevitable for all companies taking part in the digital transformation because of the growing volumes of data generated every minute and hour of the day. Research predicts that fast and actionable data will be the most valuable asset sought after by businesses of all sizes. Therefore, investing in the big data ecosystem is vital for all companies and sectors to make informed decisions. Become a data-driven business while maintaining the highest security standards, and choose to catch the wave of big data with VEER.