Impact Of Big Data Across Industries

Big data comprises of high variety, high velocity and high volume of information which can be used for decision making and enhanced insights. In other words, big data is large amount of structured and unstructured data of an organization that can be used to generate insights and then take strategic future business moves according to it.

Why is Big Data important? The significant thing to note here is that – it’s not about the amount of data; it’s about what you can do with it. Unstructured data in organizations add up to about 85% of the total data and while the majority of it was mostly ignored by companies in the past, they are slowly realizing the importance of it. When you look at it from one side, you might just be able to see general information about customers and employees, but when you combine them with powerful information processing tools, you get even more powerful insights and reports that can help you make profitable decisions for your organization.

Through big data, you can accomplish tasks like:
• Finding out the root causes of defects, issues and failures in real time.
• Analyzing buying habits of customers and generating customized offers.
• Generating risk portfolios in real-time.
• Detecting fraudulent behavior.
• Optimize planning and operations within organization.
• Predict future market trends.

How are the industries changing with Big Data
Here are some of the industries that have benefited the most by Big Data:
1. Travel
By analyzing big data for ticket prices, fuel costs, seat availability and weather conditions, travel companies are now able to improve customer satisfaction by decreasing their costs. Through big data, travel companies are also able to understand booking patterns of customers and provide them with customized discounts.

2. Healthcare
According to a recent report by Forbes, 59% of the healthcare providers said that they will be able to fulfill their objectives in the next five years, and it depends highly on the success of big data.

In fact, big data has been pivotal in the healthcare industry. Patient data can now be securely saved and accessed by doctors in real-time. It has also become easy to compare medical reports with case studies and combine them with the research from laboratories to quickly gain insights. And with so many digital healthcare devices being introduced in the market, it is only safe to say that big data will go a long way in health industry.

3. Banking
It is no secret that banks have to store a large amount of data for security reasons. But with analytic from big data, it can become extremely easy for banks to calculate credit score for their customers and see which one of those are at a risk of defaulting their loan. Big data can also help analyze network behaviors to find any anomalous or suspicious activity.

4. Telecommunication
According to a report by IBM, telecom companies that have started using big data have reported a 92% percent decrease in their total processing time while analyzing call and network data. This is of course is a huge percentage that can completely change the way telecom work. The time saved by the organizations can be used to acquire new customers and grow relationships with their current subscribers.

5. Retail
Retail industry has always had the same problem of supply and demand. The products that customers really want are out of stock while there are products that do not get bought at all. This is where big data comes to rescue. Through big data, retail companies can look at the insights and understand which products are doing better than the others to fill the supply and demand gap.

Challenges and Opportunities that follow:
While big data is helping and changing the way industries work, there are still big challenges ahead. In most of the cases, data sets in the companies are too large in volume; they move too fast or are too complex for traditional software to process them. That means you have to invest a great deal of money to implement a complete big data solution for your organization. Not only would you have to invest in efficient hardware and software but you would also have to setup a separate team to run big data analysis. And even with that, it has been reported that most companies are not able to use more than 12% of their big data.

But the bottom line is – big data helps to improve performance, unearth insights that would have otherwise remained hidden and it does it all in real-time. And that is the most important reason why the organizations opt to use it. Also, as the price of analytic software, communication devices and sensors continues to fall, more and more companies will join the bandwagon to use big data.