Guides 6 m July 26, 2021

Big Data, Big Problems: How to REALLY Handle Your Data in 2021

There are a plethora of ways to use big data to your advantage and so many reasons why big data is important for business. The insights you gather from big data can help your business guide customers through real-time interactions, prevent credit card fraud, anticipate and prevent hardware issues, and so on.

Big data has a lot of potential and we can definitely see how big data is changing the world. However, unfortunately, a lot of companies don’t know how to harness that potential and do effective data management. In fact, only 26% of companies say they have achieved a data-driven culture.

That brings out some important questions like:

What are big data problems?
How can you handle big data to avoid those issues?

If you’re looking for answers to these and similar questions, you will find them in this article.

Data Silos

If you’ve ever collected data, you know that it comes from a variety of sources and in big quantities, and all of that data needs to be combed through and organized. A mistake many organizations make is keeping their data in data silos, which store all of the data in separate units that aren’t even connected.

The problem here is that it makes it impossible to get insight from data that is stored this way and making decisions becomes a slow and grueling process. The way you can solve this is by integrating your data with the help of proper tools.

Inaccurate Data

Data is useful only if it’s accurate. If you store low-quality data, it won’t serve any purpose. Instead, it will only use up storage space and make it harder to collect insight from accurate data. If you have missing data, duplicate data, inaccurate data, or data with inconsistent formatting, it’s like having no data at all.

This is one of the biggest big data problems and the way you can solve it is by defining all of the necessary data you need to collect. When you collect the type of data you need, make sure to cleanse it regularly, as well as organize and normalize data from different sources before you upload it to your analytics tool.

Improper Data Collection Methods

If you don’t use proper methods for collecting your data, you will severely limit your brand’s growth. Some implications of using improper data collection methods include inaccurate data outputs, operational inefficiencies, inaccurate campaign success, and an increase in operational costs.

To avoid all of this, you should understand how big data works and follow these steps:

Decide what information is important to your business, how much data you want to collect, and from where.
Set a timeframe for collecting all of the necessary data.
Determine the exact method you want to use, which can include surveys, social media monitoring, online tracking, and so on.
Collect the data and organize it.
Analyze all of the data you’ve collected and implement the findings.

Pro Tip: Use electronic forms that collect the data you need, the right way. You can easily create one with a form builder like 123FormBuilder.

Gaining Insights from Data

Now that you have accurate, clean, and well-organized data, you need to know how to use it to gain insight that will improve your business.

Can big data predict the future? Well, considering the insights you gain from it, it absolutely can.

The best way to gain these insights is to use robust data analytics tools that will help you see the big picture regarding what your customers really want. But that’s not enough as you also need to break down this data into bits of information that can easily be analyzed and turned into actionable outcomes.

When you understand how big data is used and how to gain insights from it, you will see how big data helps companies and why so many businesses use it on a daily basis.

Fast-Advancing Technology

Technology is changing and evolving at an accelerated rate and every new technological advancement just evolves over time and becomes more efficient. This can also count as one of the more serious big data problems since the data tools you’re using could become outdated very soon.

To solve this, you should be aware of how fast-advancing technology really is and prepare for it by keeping up with technology trends and always staying informed. That way, you will always be prepared for new products and features and always be aware of which big data approach promotes efficiency.

Data Privacy

Not taking data privacy seriously when big data goes wrong can have a lot of repercussions for your business. If a data breach occurs, you will lose a lot of your customers and probably need to pay a hefty fine as you will probably breach a regulation such as the GDPR.

It’s important to work on your data privacy as much as possible by following these steps:

Embed data privacy into the core of your data strategy and staff training and always have a disaster recovery plan.
Create effective data governance procedures that will allow you to manage data privacy on multiple apps and different operating systems from any source.
Invest in higher maintenance costs.
Carefully manage data access within your organization.
Use tools to gain visibility of all of your data to see what data needs to have an extra layer of protection.
Use a cloud-based solution that is able to handle the constantly increasing scale of data.

Data Growth

The quantity of data organizations store keeps increasing and it can become a challenge to companies that don’t know how to handle big data. This is especially a problem since a lot of stored data is unstructured and can’t even be found in databases.

You can solve the issue of data growth if you use techniques such as:

Compression, which reduces the number of bits within data.
Deduplication, which removes unwanted and duplicate data.
Data tiering, which allows you to store data in multiple storage tiers.

Insufficient Knowledge

Companies that want to run these modern technologies efficiently need to hire skilled data professionals that have a greater understanding of how big data is processed. Unfortunately, one of the main big data problems businesses face is a lack of experts.

To solve this, recruit skilled professionals with sufficient knowledge who know everything about data from simple to more complicated data processes.

Tools

With so many different tools on the market which are created by renowned companies, it can be hard to choose the one that is perfect for you. However, tools are necessary.

Instead of wasting money on the wrong tool, it’s better to hire a professional who will help you choose the right tool for your business. An experienced professional can recommend the best tools that support your business goals and solve most of your big data problems.

Conclusion

In this data-driven world, many people are wondering “How will big data influence our lives?”. Therefore, we all need to be aware of the pressing big data problems. When you know those problems and exactly how you need to handle your data, all your processes will go more smoothly.

Just make sure you’re implementing solutions that align with your business goals and that you have a team of experts behind you who will help you understand big data more clearly. And of course, don’t forget about modern data tools that can make your data analytics and management much more efficient.