Big Data: Riding the Wave
A cut-out-and-keep guide for IT Managers
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Big data has the potential to revolutionise the business world. Big data is about digital content and the information surrounding its consumption. It’s also about the capture and analysis of this data. Each piece of information you create forms a digital shadow that continuously grows. A gigabyte of stored data can generate more than a petabyte of related data. Companies that aren’t using big data architecture and analytical tools won’t be able to compete with those that are ready and able to handle large, complex, multi-structured data sets. The production of big data is ever increasing.
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90 percent of the world’s data has been created in the last two years.
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The companies with the tools to harness the power of big data will be better prepared to face the future. A big data strategy can help improve customer relations, reduce costs, accelerate and synchronise delivery, and enhance decision making. IT managers will be key in the transition from traditional IT architecture to big data, acting as essential components when it comes to developing and delivering the strategies, policies and projects that will shape their company’s future. How IT managers react when faced with implementing big data strategy could be a career defining moment.
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Global advertising solution provider MediaMind introduced a big data strategy that would scale its processing capability and allow for greater flexibility in data analysis. It took its processing capabilities from several terabytes into the petabyte range and now has rapid data availability, enabling more detailed queries and extra analyses. Leading smart grid platform provider Silver Spring Networks applied a big data strategy that included high-performance analytics capabilities, which could handle the multiple petabytes of data generated by two-way communication between a utility and its grid devices. Its solution means it can increase grid efficiency through historical data mining, enabling rapid response times and deeper analytics (it has the ability to load a day’s worth of data for a million meters in under 50 seconds). Media company O’Reilly implemented a big data plan that enabled it to mine multiple terabytes of data on an hourly basis. It reduced query completion time from ten hours to six minutes, enabling it to run more analysis cycles in less time.
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There are challenges... IT managers implementing a big data strategy will have to choose products suited to their company’s needs. Storage scalability, analytics, user requirements and disaster recovery all need to be taken into account. If you want to lead your company into the future, you need a big data solution that accommodates and handles big data’s three dimensions: volume, variety, velocity. IT managers will have to help cultivate a new generation of data scientists with the ability to mine data. Currently there’s a gap in that field and 63 per cent of data scientists, working on big data projects today, believe the shortage will continue into the foreseeable future. You’ll also have to oversee a cultural shift, where the consumerisation of IT will change the way data is stored and analysed.
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But there are also opportunities... The right big data strategy gives forward thinking companies the chance to define their industries. IT managers can lead this change and can become the data custodians of the future. IT managers have a career defining opportunity to help their companies ride the oncoming big data wave, while watching competitors struggle and drown.
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