Optimizing your business’ operations can be critical to the success of your company. But crunching numbers, especially at a large company, can be painstaking and time consuming which, in itself, is not an optimal use of employee time or productivity. So, what can you do? Simply put, let your computer do all the work. The types of applications that collect, store and analyze data are called data solutions. These programs have gained increasing popularity and advancement over the past few years as large corporations have needed to understand the value of huge, complex sets of data, or big data.

Big data really gives businesses a complete look at their operations, sales and customer base. Often, this data can show you issues within your organization that you didn’t even know were happening. Many companies analyze their big data to create efficiency and introduce new products as well as for marketing automation and increasing customer satisfaction. Since the data is compiled so quickly, businesses are able to make decisions as they arise instead of needing to wait for an employee to write up a monthly report.

Here are a few of the most significant functions of big data:

• Customer experience: Understand your audience so you can improve customer interaction
• Fraud prevention: Spot patterns in the data that point to hackers or insider threats
• Innovation: Get insights about just about anything to better drive financial decisions
• Maintenance: Detect device failures before they cause contingency issues
• Operations: Assess inventory management, employee productivity and more to ensure you are using the most efficient processes

Big data contains more variety, arrives at greater volumes and with more velocity than traditional data. It also has more value and veracity. Let’s take a deeper look at each of these terms:

• Variety: Big data includes structured data that can be sorted into a relational database, like traditional data, as well as unstructured and semistructured data that needs additional processing to obtain value and support metadata
• Volume: Organizations that require big data solutions need to process high volumes of data, sometimes exceeding petabytes
• Velocity: Big data is received quickly and can often be needed to be processed in real or near real time
• Value: Big data is gathered to decide business decisions
• Veracity: The results of analyzing big data need to be accurate

Big data solutions allow businesses to store, manage, analyze and view big data to provide value to a business’ operations. The technology is constantly improving, but they require a few core competencies. These are:

• Integration: Big data solutions gather data from multiple sources in multiple formats, so they need to reformat all incoming data to be readable
• Management: The big data collected needs to be stored within the program
• Analyzation: Big data solutions present data in an easily digestible way

All businesses can benefit from data solutions, whether or not they’re collecting big data. If your company isn’t using one of these valuable resources, you could be wasting money without realizing it. Contact Ameritech today to see how we can create a custom data solution for your business.