Big data analytics seems like the next big buzzword in the world of IT, but truth be told, it is much more than that. When you have huge volumes of inbound and outbound data at high velocity, your business is bound to face some difficulties. For Sony, the failure to realize the potential challenges of big data cost them a staggering $171 million as a result of a data breach lawsuit. Retail giant, Target, also had to settle for $1.1 billion as a result of poor data privacy and protection.
Despite the potential consequences of big data, it has experienced tremendous growth- 58% in 2013 alone! While having data repositories to store millions of terabytes of data is one thing, ensuring consistency in networking, data privacy, security, and above all, analytics is quite another. Let’s go through some of the potential challenges that big data analytics bring.
Failure to Derive Data
Those critical of big data analytics will tell you that the investment is fairly large with little possible returns. It is true to some extent, especially when we consider the sources where the data is coming from. For instance, big data makes use of data from all alternate sources, including social media, different websites of companies, credit card transactions, and every other possible source you can think of. This means that the consumer data available to you is raw and has to be refined to be able to derive value. More often than not though, businesses are not able to store, let alone manage, such volumes of data. This is down to the fact that the cloud based networking solutions available today only favor the multinational corporations that have the funds to invest in such networks. Hence, many medium scale firms to large businesses are not able to derive the data, and hence, are never able to fulfill the ROI.
Poor Networking Infrastructure
Data repositories serve the purpose of storing your data, simply put. Networking allows you to allocate different types to data to their specific repositories. By doing so, it becomes easy to derive value from them, which can eventually help a business in the decision making process. However, there are instances where businesses compromise security and privacy of consumer data, Sony’s subsidiary PlayStation is a classic example of this.
Now let’s take this into perspective. When you have large volumes of data filling up your repositories, whoever managing the infrastructure has to assign permissions. If not backed by a good antivirus and malware security application, there are chances that consumer data may actually be harmful. On top of that, since big data is still evolving, so are its risks. The potential risk of losing personally identifiable information (PII) of consumers can result in a hefty lawsuit against your business. In simple words, if your business does not have the investment and resources to fund such analytics, then you’re better off experimenting other ways to improve customer experience. While big data analytics definitely has a future, especially in the FMCG industry, it will take time before we have solutions that can help derive data without compromising security and integrity.
