Making the world go around

The importance of data in business operations is obvious. It is how, when, and where it is put to use that makes all the difference between today and tomorrow.

Businesses are increasingly living on the edge today. Companies embrace data-rich digital transformation innovations for a competitive advantage. Cloud providers like us have enabled companies to deliver both the solutions expertise and the data platform to power mission-critical applications for e-commerce, digital payments, fraud prevention, customer 360, real-time recommendation engines, and other ‘instant decisioning’ applications.

Data is massive and extremely powerful. It can tell us about a company’s strengths and weaknesses. The algorithms can utilise scientific methods to provide valuable and forward-looking insights to an organisation. Data is produced, analysed, converted to knowledge, and sent to the enterprise edge, where it impacts billions of consumer interactions each day. Positive experiences result in increased revenue and customer loyalty.

Therefore, constructing a strategy for making all this data actionable is extremely important. Actionable insights are meaningful findings that result from analysing data. For example, in autonomous driverless cars, data on the weather, traffic conditions, objects, people, and animals among other things are critical in making a decision of when to stop, decelerate or swerve in a particular direction. The data from sensors is collected in real-time and decisions are made based on it.

Similarly, for a retail company that sells online, the vast amount of its data can be converted into useful insights and can help in knowing the consumer preferences better. The more data are available to data scientists and engineers for use in creating decision-making algorithms, the better the yield of the decisions. This helps a company in developing more effective marketing strategies, increase sales and decrease costs.

According to a recent study by Cognizant, the breathtaking speed and scale of the COVID-19 crisis has put tremendous levels of stress on analytics/models.

Moreover, the pandemic has made organisations realise the importance of data much more than ever before. According to a recent study by Cognizant, the breathtaking speed and scale of the COVID-19 crisis have put tremendous levels of stress on analytics and models. They have also created challenges for ensuring that the data analytics and models employed are timely, complete, and secure.

No company or industry is exempt from today’s data challenges. Regardless of whether the company is in finance, telecom, healthcare, or any other industry, all organisations are impacted by data and they live on the edge. However, for organisations in today’s marketplace, just being ‘on the edge’ is not enough. The leadership needs to be bold enough to make the right decisions based on data analytics to stay competitive and relevant in the market. Some steps to make the right decisions include focusing on the company objectives, viewing the relevant data and insights drawn from the same, and planning your strategy, and defining parameters to measure the success.

Enterprises are placing a high priority on data integration, especially to support analytics and business intelligence (BI) initiatives corporate-wide.

According to the 2020 Data Pipelines Market Study, enterprises are placing a high priority on data integration, especially to support analytics and business intelligence (BI) initiatives corporate-wide. It further states that 80% of business operations leaders, including those from service delivery, manufacturing, and supply chain, say data integration is critical to their success.

Overall, it would be apt to say that data in today’s world is one of the most important commodities. Data can define a company’s success or failure. Analysing and evaluating the right data is the need of the hour. While we live on the edge, it’s crucial to make decisions based on real-time data insights, as that is what would define where your company would stand tomorrow.

By Aveekshith Bushan, Regional Director and General Manager - APAC, Aerospike