The term “big data” has been around for some time now. This concept is evolving and it is the driving force behind many of the ongoing waves of digital transformation, from Artificial intelligence, IoT and data science.
Today, in this digital era, for every two days the amount of data that gets created is increasing rapidly than ever. According to Bernard Marr, by 2020, the amount of digital information available will have grown to 50 zettabytes from around 5 zettabytes in 2019.
Data is generated whenever we go online, carry our GPS-equipped smartphones, communicate with our friends through social media or other chat applications when we shop and when our smart home devices communicate with each other or with the home servers. The collection of all these data since the beginning of the digital age can be referred to as big data, because of the huge volume available.
But how is this big data used? Currently, big data is put to excellent advantage in practice in almost any purpose. Let’s explore a few below:
- Understanding the target audience
This is one of the biggest areas of big data use today. Companies along with their traditional data sets, collect social media data, browsers logs, text analytics and sensor data to fully understand their customers. With these data, customer’s preferences and behaviours will be analyzed, which ultimately leads to predictive models to facilitate future businesses targeting these customers.
Read here to understand more about big data analytics in marketing.
- Optimizing business process
Business processes can also be optimized beneficially owing to the predictions and insights that are received upon the analysis of the big data. Based on the prediction generated from the social media data, web search trends and weather forecast, retailers are able to stock supplies accordingly.
One important business process that has immensely benefited with big data analytics in the supply chain or delivery route optimization.
Furthermore, it helps in the optimization of talent acquisition and their engagement using big data tools.
- Improving Healthcare
Big data analytics could compute and decode the entire DNA strings in minutes and will allow us to find new cures and better understand and predict disease patterns. Integrating data from medical records with social media analytics enables us to monitor and predict the developments of epidemics and disease outbreaks
- Improving Research
AI-assisted computing and analytics on any big data sets can open new sources to scientists. Census data and other huge parameters of population data can help researchers to get a bigger picture of the health and science associated.
- Improving security
Big data techniques are used to detect and prevent cyberattacks, predict criminal activity and catch criminals by Police forces and even the credit card companies use big data to detect fraudulent transactions.
Big data is used to improve many aspects of our life and there are so many widespread areas and new categories where big data tools are applied. Big data analytics helps us to change when the market changes rather than being hardcore.
