‘Big’ data for small business?
There can be few people in the corporate IT arena who are not familiar with the term ‘Big Data’. It is certainly a well-used buzzword to describe one of the fastest growing sectors in IT – management and making sense of the vast amount of data generated by businesses and their IT systems.
Large corporations have been investing vast amounts of resource into Big Data with a recent US study reporting 91% of Fortune 1000 senior executives saying their organization has a Big Data initiative in place or is planning one and 68% of them expecting their organizations to invest more than $1 million on Big Data initiatives in 2013.
So why are businesses investing in Big Data? Well it represents a fundamental shift in the way businesses are being run from making decisions based on research and sample data to basing them on accurate, real world, real time data which gives deep intelligence into the performance of their company.
You may feel that Big Data is the domain of the Enterprise but as is so often the case in IT this is just as relevant if not more so to SME organisations who are already seeing the opportunity to use data analytics to give them a competitive advantage in the market place. In fact you are probably already a user of big data systems – search engines and social networks are pioneers of the big data revolution; the intelligence received from the likes of Google, Facebook and LinkedIn having become a part of everyday life.
As the ‘Big’ Data revolution comes to the SME market, a number of tools have begun to appear which give business executives slick dashboards with real time information to show key performance trends across their business on which they can make informed decisions. What’s more these tools are no longer costly and complex to deploy and are commonly provided through user friendly web based cloud platforms.
So how do you get started? The good news is you will most likely already have the data in your business systems. They key is to unlock its potential.
Speak to Pro Drive today on 0330 124 3599 – our business has already transformed the way we operate by opening up our data to the business and we can help you do the same.
