Big Data Analytics for Small Businesses
The ever expanding internet data coupled with social and mobile infrastructure expansion has made big data analytics a buzz word, especially looking at the fact that ninety percent of the world’s internet data is created in the last couple of years. However Big Data is the name of a problem, not a solution. The solution is the advanced algorithms running on large platforms crunching data and numbers to generate useful information. It could be termed as data recycling to obtain packets of information from a dense knowledge and data clouds. Naturally, most solutions involving big data are based on huge processing clusters to handle the load of processing bulk information making it prohibitive for small and medium level business which cannot cope with the barrier of entry investment. In the last few years, large enterprises have invested their resources to generate analytics and harvested tremendous gains in business by streamlining marketing and streamlining products to user needs. However cloud computing platforms have opened this market for small and medium sized business that can now leverage the available processing power of the cloud to dive into the immense analytics market. There are numerous lucrative opportunities in commercial transaction systems, website traffic monitoring and social media analytics besides others that are waiting to be explored.
Most experts have learned over time that taking scratch notes or relying on excel sheets alone will not make them competitive. They have to take advantage of systematic skills in data management with advanced technologies which can process large amounts of data and make sense from it. The pay as you go model in cloud platforms is ideal for small companies that can pay little, especially in terms of infrastructure and human resource overheads. The time savings and quick testing also makes sense for companies that wish to touch the base before diving full throttle. Hence the availability of cloud resources is opening new venues of business expansion for small companies that can quickly take up a specialized analytics opportunity to improve internal business or provide reporting to other enterprises. At the same time, small companies can take advantage from new cloud-computing based tools that are already leveraging new techniques to mine analytics and generate trend reports. These tools can capture behavior and impressions of prospective and previous customers to produce predictive models and forecast future actions. By spending small sums on these reports, some time just a few hundred dollars, a small company can get a grasp of user needs or information and technology flow. However, the overwhelming information can be a pitfall for small companies that may collect more than they need. Hence it is crucial to decide on the factors that value your business the most as well as concentrating on fewer but complete tools to achieve better accuracy and convergence.
By Salam UI Haq
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