What, Why, and How of Big Data Analytics For Beginners

All businesses and individuals generate an abundance of data each day now. Whenever you order online, open an email, r interact with a mobile application, or post on social media, a bungle of data is generated, which is used for real-time operations and also to be stored about the transaction. Inside the organizations, the employees, marketing team, vendors, supply chains, and finance teams generate an abundance of data. Big data is all about handling huge volumes of these databases, which come into a business in various forms from a number of sources.

Previously, the majority of these data used to go uncollected or unutilized. However, many organizations now recognize the advantages of collecting as much data as possible from all their touchpoints. However, just collecting and storing this big data is not enough. It becomes worth the effort only if you can put it into use. Thanks to the growth in big data technology that you can no use these data sets for analytics and transform these huge stores of data into insights for business decision making.

Big data analytics in action

Analytics with big data is the process of analyzing huge data sets with the help of analytical tools to uncover trends and patterns in the data and correlate volumes of raw data to make data-driven decisions. All these analytical processes use statistical analysis methods like regression and clustering.

We hear about big data as a buzzword for the last couple of decades whenever we refer to the capability of software and hardware to handle huge volumes of structured and unstructured data. In the early 2000s, when information technology had grown to make organizations handle a big volume of data, database services providers started to explore the scope of huge volume unstructured data storage, which led to technologies like NoSQL DBs. Since that time, many new technologies ranging from smartphones to Amazon had contributed in a big way to generate and effectively store huge volumes of data available to the organizations.

With this explosion in data, many of the early projects like Spark, Hadoop, and NoSQL DBs were created to enable the storage and manipulation of big data stores. This area continued to evolve and grow as data scientists have brought up new ways to integrate big amounts of complex data and information through networks, sensors, transactions, smart devices, websites, and more. Big data analytics processes are now being used with many emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, the internet of things, etc. When you think of databases for big data stores, providers like RemoteDBA.com can come to your help.

Working on big data analytics

As with any other data processing, big data also refers to collecting data, cleaning, processing, and analyzing the same to help businesses run their big data applications. Let us explore these in detail.

1. Collection of data

The concept of data collection looks unique in every organization. With the help of today’s advanced technology, modern-day businesses can gather structured and unstructured data from various sources. You can get it from mobile applications to cloud storage and beyond. Different types of data are getting stored in data warehouses, which can be further scraped using BI tools. There is not only structured data, but the raw unstructured data to come under big data, which is so diverse and complex to be stored in the data lakes.

2. Processing data

Once you collect the data and store it next, you must organize the data to get the most accurate results through analytics. When you have a huge unstructured set of exponentially growing data, data processing can become a challenge for organizations. Batch processing is the approach of handling large data blocks over time. This is useful when there is a significant turnaround time between collecting data and analyzing the same. Another approach is stream processing, in which small sets of data are processed at a time, which helps shorten the delay between collection and analyzing the data. This enables much quicker decision-making, but stream processing is a bit complex and also expensive.

3. Cleansing data

Big or small, data requires proper scrubbing to ensure quality and offer reliable results through analysis. All the data sets should be correctly formatted, and any irrelevant or duplicative data should be eliminated. Dirty data can be misleading and obscured and can cause flawed insights. You need to adopt proper data cleansing mechanisms for big data stores to be reliable.

4. Analyzing data

It will take time to convert big data into a usable form. Once you get it done, you can deploy high-end analytical processes to turn it into actionable insights. Some of the methods used for this are as below:

– Data mining to sort through large data sets and identify any patterns or relationships to identify any anomalies in data clusters.

– Predictive analytics uses the historical data of organizations to predict future trends and risks.

– Deep learning can be trained on the human cognitive learning patterns and layer machine learning algorithms and AI tools to derive patterns from complex data.

Tools and technologies for Big Data

You cannot narrow down big data analytics to a single tool or technology. Instead, several tools combine and work to help you collect, cleanse, process, and analyze big data. In the real-time scenario of big data analytics, let us introduce you to some of the major players in the ecosystems now:

– Hadoop

– NoSQL

– MapReduce

– YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator)

– Spark

– Tableau etc.

To conclude, we can say that the capability to analyze a huge volume of data at a much faster pace in real-time can benefit organizations on a big day. This will allow businesses to work more efficiently and use data to make important business decisions and answer questions quickly. Big data analytics is very important in modern-day business management because organizations tend to use colossal amounts of data in various formats from different sources to grab the possible opportunities at a very early stage by analyzing the risks to mitigate the same at the first point. So, big data can help improve the bottom lines for businesses and make them think more quickly and sharply to grow faster.

Author Bio-

Jiggy Clark is a Business Advisor. He always shares his updated knowledge about Business, Advertising through Social Media. He is passionate about new Cars. In his free time, he used to play with children.