Building a Holistic Big Data Strategy

To realize big benefits from big data, businesses must craft a holistic big data analytics strategy. KPMG suggests that businesses must align their big data analytics initiatives with their business objectives. Businesses must also take a 360 degree view of the enormous amounts of data – historical, transactional, and predictive – such that they have clear understanding of their objectives. The best way to drive big data initiatives in order to unlock significant business value is to base it on use cases.

Also read: The Insightful World of Big Data

Some of the key components of a holistic big data strategy are:

Future-proof Solutions: Picking appropriate tools and technology is a key component of the big data strategy. Businesses must make an effort to evaluate the big data analytics solutions for the value they bring and choose the solutions that ensure maximum return on investment (RoI). Rapid advancements in technology are reflecting in big data analytics as well, making the solutions smarter. Therefore, businesses must look to leverage these advancements to make their investments future-proof.

Infrastructure: While infrastructure and storage are minor challenges, they deserve due attention as the infrastructure must be scalable and capable of handling enormous amounts of data. Today, it is possible for businesses to set up clusters in cloud, run them only for the required duration, and take them off once done. Businesses can also pay for what they use, which makes it a cost-efficient solution.

Data Security: In the wake of evolving cyber threats such as ransomware, malware, and increased instances of data breaches, businesses are obliged to ensure data security. Businesses, therefore, need solutions that allow them to replicate the same security, policy/incident management, and business continuity across all touchpoints, regardless of the platform or architecture.

Culture: A key factor of big data analytics strategy is instilling a data-driven culture across an organization. Therefore, businesses must ensure a seamless transition from an expert mindset to a learner mindset, which may well prove to be a daunting task.

Training: The entire big data analytics strategy can fail if businesses do not have experts with superlative big data analytics skills. Since, skilled talent is short in supply,, businesses can consider appropriate training programs on managing big data and using tools for big data analytics.

The Article has been Written by Neetu Katyal, Content and Marketing Consultant

She can be reached here.