When it comes to using data to drive business, organizations such as Google or Facebook are iconic… When they started in 2007, big data was not what it is today. All four Vs that define big data—volume, variety, velocity, and veracity—were at lower levels. But perhaps more importantly, there was not much previous experience of working with big data and using it to drive decision making in organizations. At that time, the question was still out as to whether having all that data is useful. Today, the feeling is that the value of data has been proven, and it’s more of a question of how to get it.1
Diligent businesses are those that ensure data privacy and security while leveraging its multiple advantages.
In the world we live today, data is king. Many economists believe that ‘data to this century is what oil was for the last century’—a driver for growth, change, and success. The findings of The Digital Realty Data Economy Report2, a study by Development Economics, suggest that there is huge potential for the data economy to grow further, boosting businesses and creating more jobs. As per the report, the size of the data economy of Germany accounts for ¤108.3 billion, creating 1.95 million jobs, and has an untapped potential of ¤87.9 billion. The data economy contributes $1 trillion to the US economy every year. The numbers look promising and encouraging enough to have strong faith in the power of data.
According to a May 2018 Forbes article, the amount of data created every single day amounts to 2.5 quintillion bytes. To put it another way, almost 90 percent of the data in the world was generated over the last two years. Now, one can imagine the speed and volume of data being generated through innumerable sources like IoT, sensors, wearable devices, tweets, YouTube videos, mobile communications, chats, pictures, emails, blogs, Skype, print media, TV, smart devices, and so on. To give some statistics, Google processes more than 40,000 searches every second (ie, 3.5 billion searches per day), 456,000 tweets are sent and 4,146,600 YouTube videos are watched per minute; and every minute, 154,200 Skype calls are made, 156 million emails are sent, 16 million text messages are written, and 15,000 GIFs are sent via Facebook messenger. On top of this, we have humongous amounts of data generated through platform-driven services like Uber, Venmo, and Spotify. Precisely, big data is getting bigger and bigger day by day in volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and ‘value’.
This story is from the November - December 2018 edition of The Smart Manager.
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This story is from the November - December 2018 edition of The Smart Manager.
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