How utilizing commonly found information can transform your business

Pervez Delawalla, President and CEO, Net2EZ

In the past 20 years, companies have been generating an increasing amount of data. A company’s database used to be filled with the traditional information necessary for conducting business, such as product sales or demographic information. However, the growth of social media has created a massive pool of information that any company can access, mine and benefit from.





Data about consumers is being collected from social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter, data about businesses can be collected from sources such as LinkedIn in and Foursquare, and there is data contained in emails coming into a company. This data had previously not been considered a useful source of mining but has now become fair game.

Do all companies have access to big data?


Even small companies selling few products are gleaning this information and benefiting from it. Customer information can be pulled from social media and email campaigns and used to promote your business to those customers. Big data is viable for companies of all sizes.

What challenges are associated with having big data?

Storing big data was traditionally cost prohibitive, which is why only large companies could do it. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the volume of data growth in the U.S. for big companies will increase 40 percent year over year from 2009 until 2020. When you look at the amount of data being generated and the growth of that data, the cost of maintaining it had been the biggest hurdle for smaller companies.



What methods are available to companies to help store this data?

Big data can be stored privately or on servers that host multiple clients. Which option a company chooses depends on how important it is to keep that information secure. If a hospital were storing patient data, it would want it hosted on a private server.


Public cloud services are available, but these are less secure than private services. Public storage is more suitable for things such as marketing campaigns, in which the data being used is critical only for a short time and has no real value proposition for anyone other than the company.



Many companies don’t realize what they have beyond their traditional database. Big data may be beyond the scope of traditional customer relationship management tools and that is sometimes where the treasure trove of data exists. Accessing that data will open a world of opportunities for your business.


Insights Technology is brought to you by Net2EZ

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