Data analytics: Data deluge to business insights

By Jyoti Prakash

in the post-pandemic era, where every business is being controlled and managed remotely, we have entered into the Data Age and data analytics has become an essential service. This rapidly changing environment will soon create two types of organisations, ones who will make things happen and take action on their data and the ones who will find it difficult to sustain momentum in their operations.

Organisations are becoming increasingly reliant on new technologies like cloud, IoT, machine learning and more, in order to survive. Businesses need to have a data strategy in place, as they are now generating more data than they know, which needs to be analysed to make insightful business decisions. A recent data survey revealed that 86% of the organisations are unprepared for the Data Age and 66% of IT and business managers report that half or more of their organisation’s data is dark (untapped, unknown, and unused).

Not an option but a necessity to ensure business survival
Data analysis is no longer a tool for organisations to stay ahead of the competition. It is slowly becoming critical to support the increased demand on digital infrastructure and drive digital transformations to solve challenges across all sectors.

Gearing up the tech infrastructure to meet the ‘always on’ mode
Traditional approaches such as data silos, lakes, working across countless legacy systems and fragmented cloud services create massive data volumes. As a result, organisations end up spending billions of dollars and countless man hours to extract the true value of this data. Moreover, organisations that are moving to cloud are facing further complications with services coming from different places.

Hence, there is a need for a platform that is built to withstand the challenges thrown by the always-online, always-connected world of today.

Organisations are therefore required to integrate traditional models with emerging technologies to remove barriers between data and action and seamlessly thrive in the Data Age. With such hybrid infrastructure, organisations will hold the potential to investigate, monitor, analyze and act on data in one place and simultaneously be prepared for the data challenges of the future. Furthermore, the right infrastructure will allow businesses to unlock previously inaccessible value by understanding the relationships between data stored throughout different databases and systems. It will also help in enabling systems and teams to analyse and respond to events to answer business-critical questions across organisations.

Analysis of data into meaningful insights is critical and organisations need to be mindful with an appropriate data strategy and adopt an infrastructure that is compatible with the always evolving needs of the end users. Without the right data strategy and platform, rapid transformation can counter reaction by adding massive complexities and create hindrances while turning the data into action. Organisations that are able to capture, make sense of their data and act on them using the right tools will be better prepared for a smooth transition into the Data Age!

The writer is regional sales director, India & SAARC, Splunk (a data analytics firm)