Beginners Guide to Big Data| What is it and what are its Benefits

Before we begin to talk about big data, let us have a quick view of what data itself means.

Data is a set of values of information (qualitative or quantitative). It may be a variable, character, or symbol that is stored and transferred in the form of electric signals. Now talking about big data, it is simply something that has been around for a while but a large number of people still have their doubts about what is big data.

Conventionally, big data is a set of immensely large amounts of data so complex and scattered that it cannot be operated with the old school data management methods that were designed and used before the rise of big data. It is a group of data that is extreme in volume and is growing significantly with time. It is data that conventional data management systems can neither store nor process effectively, but with an enormous size such that they don't fit into the orthodox database networks.

If the big data growth trends are to be believed then the CAGR between 2019 and 2027 is going to be around 12%. The exponential increase in data in recent years led to the rise of big data solutions. Some day-to-day examples of big data are:

• The New York Stock Exchange produces around 1 TB of new data every day.
• On Facebook, approximately 500+ TB of data is added to its servers every day.

Big data can be broadly classified as the 5 V's which are Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity, and Value. Volume means that the organizations need to regularly update their storage as big data need large amounts of storage space. Velocity refers to the responding time of organizations in real-time as big data is created every second in huge amounts.

Big data is very versatile and can be of any format or type because of all these factors, all the data cannot be trusted. This is something one has to deal with while handling big data.

Big data works on the concept that the more you gather information on the situation or about a thing, the more you can analyze and understand the various aspects of it. This helps in getting important updates and news about stuff which further benefits in making calls or predictions since we can easily study its past. The more we study the key points, the more reliable we become in making decisions.

How is Big Data Beneficial?

Big data is a continuously evolving and growing concept. It has many benefits across businesses be it small or large scale. Big data tools and analytics help in acquiring information from various platforms such as company databases, social media sites, and third parties, etc. Through this, we can monitor as well as predict the future results in business and the market. By using this, it becomes easy to detect issues in the system and rectify them. This facilitates us to work with the full potential of data-driven marketing. Also, it fastens the response time of requests, queries in real-time and speedy completion of tasks and outperforms the predictions.

The basic ideology behind making big data or big data solutions the talk of the town is a simple fact that once you segregate your bulk data, you can use your resources effectively and efficiently. Just imagine that you are running a business and you can use certain machine learning algorithms and figure out what is your most liked product, why it is making the largest sales, and what are the scopes of improvements for the least sold product. This way you can not only invest in improving those flaws of the particular products but will also save costs in not investing it elsewhere or hiring someone for the same task.

You will get to know what your targeted audience is and can provide targeted ads and feasible discounts, to attract more audience. You can even use these Data Mining and Visualization tools in your internal areas of business such as finance, sales, production, etc.

In today's world, social media is involved everywhere. It plays a major part in our lives and cannot be ignored. More than 65% of people use their social logins for websites. Many people use their social profiles like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc to log in to a site, and hence, as per their privacy settings and access grants, their information can be used to promote your businesses to a better target audience. Big data solutions can inspect this social data and understand customers' responses to the products and services of the company.

Using big data tools not only reduces the expenditures and costs but also allows you to get an insight into your competitors as well. When you render great services to customers, you earn their reliability, which further gives you a good verdict, thereby bringing in new customers and meeting their expectations as well using their purchasing patterns.

Conclusion

Big data solution is a booming industry and be it any business, small start-up, or any other industry, measuring and predicting the market trends and patterns is always going to be highly beneficial in all manners.