With the increasing dependency of people on connectivity and social media platforms, companies have garnered volumes of data to gain insights into customer trends and demands. By helping them know the industry better, big data enables enterprises to strategize better and build upon the opportunities to drive revenue. One can amplify the benefits of big data with cloud computing. This blog talks about this profoundly and helps you understand how you can give your big data initiatives an edge. But, let's first get into the essential details.

What Is Big Data?

According to Gartner, big data is a high volume, high velocity, and variety of information assets that help enterprises leverage cost-effective, innovative information processing systems to enable deep insights, data-based decision making, and process automation.

In other words, one can understand big data as a combination of five Vs, that are:

1. Velocity: Data can accumulate at a rapid pace. However, what really matters is how quickly that data can be processed, analyzed, and examined to derive relevant data insights for decision-making.

2. Volume: Data collected by enterprises of various sizes and industries is extensive in volume. This forms to be the defining characteristic of the big data concept.

3. Variety: The data collected as a result is of multiple types containing data-based and unstructured data, including tweets, emails, images, videos, and more required for the enterprises to be processes at all the time.

4. Veracity: Big data can contain a lot of noise, given the large volume and diverse variety. Veracity refers to data certainty and how efficiently your big data tools and analysis can separate the noise from essential data for your business.

5. Value: Although it is not inherent to the data volume, it is also an essential aspect of big data. However, the actual value of big data can only be realized when the relevant information is captured and processes to gain the insights that help businesses.

Why is Big Data Important?

Accenture report has established that 79% of the corporate executives surveyed believe that companies that don’t adopt big data will lag behind the competitors and may even face extinction. Not only this, a whopping 83% of organizations have invested in big data initiatives intending to stay competitive.

Big data helps organizations to collect valuable information and identify patterns and new opportunities. These insights drive strategic decision-making, efficient operations, higher revenue, and better customer retention and satisfaction. Key benefits of investing in big data analytics include:

1. Cost Reduction: Big data technologies like Hadoop and cloud analytics help businesses save financial investments by storing large data volumes and identify more efficient ways of doing business.

2. Faster and Data-Driven Decision Making: Using cutting-edge big data tools and analytics, enterprises can analyze new data sources immediately. This information can be processed to garner valuable insights and make more informed strategic decisions.

3. Leverage Data to Attract and Retain Customers: Having the ability to gauge customer requirements and trends, you have the power to offer your customers the right services that they need currently. This brings you new customers and helps retain the existing ones, and ensures the highest customer satisfaction.

4. Big data can also benefit organizations' internal working. Here are the major areas, according to popular research:

Why Big Data and Cloud Computing are the Perfect Combinations?

Cloud computing has already proven its potential to transform businesses. These advantages increase manifolds when combined rightly with big data.

Big data involves the analysis and processing of large data volumes (petabytes, exabytes, and even in some cases, zettabytes). Cloud's scalable environment allows for data-intensive applications that enable robust business analytics. Cloud implementation also reduces the complexity of connectivity within the organization and improves collaboration. This gives teams better access to analytics and streamlines information sharing.

While IT leaders recognize these benefits in multiple forms, it is commendable how C-suite executives can leverage valuable insights to get a better visualization of company operations and make informed decisions.

For example, let's talk about the supply chain department of the retail businesses. Optimization of the supply chain and efficient defect tracking are among the principal concerns of the C-level executives. This can be easily streamlined with a visual representation of the records over the past and current instances. Valuable data can be derived from this, and corresponding decisions can be made. Data is also vital for the CMOs who wish to view the results of their marketing strategies, analyze the target audience's reaction, and more. At the same time, CFOs can check for strategic investment opportunities, reducing costs, and growing revenue.

Regardless of where you want to apply big data analytics, it can bring significant change in the way your organization works.

Benefits of Combining Cloud Computing and Big Data

Enterprises are increasingly relying on cloud computing and big data mix to bring significant business benefits. Here are some of them.

Requires Zero CAPEX

Big data projects come with immense infrastructure requirements, implying significant on-premise capital expenditure (CAPEX) investments. However, by utilizing the cloud's infrastructure-as-a-service model, enterprises can say goodbye to the significant CAPEX expenses by shifting them to operating expenditure (OPEX). Therefore, you will not have to make hefty upfront investments while setting up the database servers or data warehouses.

Faster Scalability

Massive volume of structured and unstructured data requires equally efficient processing power and storage. Cloud offers readily available infrastructure along with scalability to make it easier for you to manage spikes in traffic and usage.

Lowers Analytics Costs

Data mining in the cloud has increased the cost-effectiveness of big data implementation initiatives. In addition to this, it also enables you to save on costs related to system maintenance and upgrades, energy consumption, and facility management. With the cloud's inherent features, it is also simpler to manage technical aspects to process data more efficiently and garner insights. Using the cloud's pay-per-usage basis will help you optimize resource utilization.

Foster Agile and Innovative Culture

Innovation paves the way for utilizing big data to gain a competitive edge, and the cloud makes it easier for enterprises to prepare the necessary infrastructure. Helping your teams with seamless server and database management opportunities, the cloud allows for focused data analysis with quick insights. This, in turn, helps you augment product lines, operational efficiency, improved customer service, and more.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

As technology has evolved, so has the intensity of cyberattacks. Today, traditional strategies fail to offer an adequate solution to security breaches, power outages, or equipment failure. This makes it difficult for the big data developers to duplicate storage, servers, networking equipment, and other infrastructure and prepare the infrastructure for disasters that are tedious, challenging, and expensive.

To add to the challenges, legacy systems require more time to back up and restore, and this becomes increasingly daunting for big data, where data volume is massive and expensive. Having a cloud-based infrastructure enables your organization to have a proper recovery plan in place while ensuring information access and big data insights.

The Bottom Line

Cloud computing offers enterprises a cost-effective and flexible way to access and process big data. Thanks to the combination of big data and cloud computing, organizations can now store and process big data volumes seamlessly. However, it is worth noting that the success of your cloud-based big data initiatives depends on a reliable software development partner. Ensure to make the right choice while considering vital factors like cost-effectivity, turnaround time, the richness of portfolio, and more.