You must have come in contact with the saying that “nothing good comes without its other side.” The case of big data is not different. Big enterprises are including factoring in budget for big data every year. This shows the tremendous recognition that big data is gaining.
Nevertheless, investing so much on big data project doesn’t imply that they are achieving what they bargain for. According to a survey conducted by New Vantage Partners, about 74 per cent of the business executives responded that their business had grown innumerably in terms of revenue and other areas. Although, others responded “no” to their company growth, they express belief in future possible impact on their companies.
Big data benefits are enormous; however few top rated benefits would be discussed. Hence, these are key benefits that organizations report that big data does for their enterprise;
Productivity
NewVantage report showed that most companies recorded increased production and efficiency. Big data tools like Spark and Hadoop are very smart in driving any user’s productivity and overall, increase productivity and efficiency throughout the organization. This is only possible because of large array data collected and analyzed.
Velocity
The speed of big data tools is far better than the speed used by traditional tools. Tools like Hadoop have very high speed and they can give you a vast array of benefits when large data are to be stored. Big data tools are also efficient in identifying efficient ways of doing your businesses.
Strategic decision making
Don’t forget that the root of big organizations such as Microsoft, Facebook, and others that you are used to, is on decision made by the board of trustees, CEO, etc. This is to buttress the fact that businesses are maximizing big data to work for them in making decisions. it appears making good decision is the utmost goal that companies look forward to, when they employ big data. Big data analysis gives business executives the insight needed to make realistic and reasonable decisions about their companies.
Cost reduction
As an executive and user of big data analytics, your cost of operation decreases. Although, your goal may be to drive large revenue, your cost of operation reduces. Furthermore, big data analytics tools may be expensive, but you’ve got to know that the cost benefit is far greater then you may envisage.
Marketing insight
When thinking of getting ahead of competitors, big data is your savior. By analysis, a company can understand the market conditions and further gives you the insight on how your sales are doing in the market.
Fraud prevention
In many instances, many organizations are praising the advent of big data because it has helped save them from different levels of fraudulent practices such credit card frauds and cyber frauds in general. Companies rely on big data for the advantage that it helps to detect inadequacies the company.
Customer relationship management
This has proven effective. Big data integrate a log of data for companies. This data log has a database of customer information which are analyzed and used for customer services. According to a NewVantage survey, customer relationship improvement was the second top rated goal why companies use big data analytics.
You cannot exhaust the benefit of big data. While you are busy figuring out the totality of it, other new concepts and algorithms are being discovered and developed. As ESDS noted, the positive impact of big data is able to facilitate things such as new-casting, inferential software development that evaluates project results, and development of advanced computational software for correlation that allows us to understand the world.
NEGATIVE IMPACTS OF BIG DATA
You would agree that big data has provided us with more and advanced precise ideas of new chances and opportunities to understand the world we live in the areas of behaviour, business, politics and the society in general.
But, big data is not free of all infirmities. Are you surprised? Oh yes, I believe you are. Although big data seems to have a bright future for us, we must know the risks and potential disadvantages.
Privacy
With the rate at which your information is stored on the internet, your privacy is threatened. Are you dazzled already? No you shouldn’t. Have you noticed that even when you make use of privacy taps on your computer or cellphones, suggestions on your search engines are still being made to you? It simply shows there is no privacy. Even with the strongest VPN devices, your background information is still not private.
Big data can access every single detail about you and if care is not taken, there can be misuse of personal information. So, while we think big data provides absolute security and privacy, it is prone to breach in database.
Expertise issues
Several issues arise when it comes to expertise – such as, staff recruitment, training, and payment. For companies, this is a tough, negative side of big data. Companies complain of hiring process (finding the right skills for big data management) and training of new staff that manages their database. Training new personnel to acquire desired skills of their IT departments is most times costly and takes long time to get used to the company database.
In addition to that, because data analytic skills are scarce, data scientists and IT personnel charge high pay for their services.
Security
Because of high uploads, companies can be prone to attacks. Of course, there is prevention. But, that doesn’t neglect the fact that we shouldn’t be aware of this kind of potential threats. AtScale survey revealed that respondents reported that cyber-security breach is one of the greatest challenges to their companies.
Data presentation
Remember that traditional data were always neatly arranged and structured. Now, we are in the age were a variety of data is being collected in semi-structured, structured, texts forms, and severely rough forms. With big data analytics, data must be presented in neat and correct format for each tool that would be used for analysis. Not only that, data collected must be accurate and relevant to the purpose it is to be used for. Most times, this is a slow process. And, if analysis is not properly done, insight and interpretations made on the analysis would be dangerous for the purpose of the analysis.
Technological change
There is advancement every single day – in politics, economy, etc. every time a new tool is discovered, several new ones are undergoing review and testing already. Organizations often invest in new technology and in few months later, a superior and better one is out. This poses a big confusion to companies and enterprises as they often have to switch from one tools to another to suit pressing needs.
Projected costs
Most big data tools depend on open source information technology. However, housing the data, the network bandwidth to upload data to and from the analytics systems and the computational resources to conduct the data analysis are quite expensive to buy and maintain.
Although, much positivity is associated with big data, the challenges look preeminent and unavoidable. If care is taken, the negative impact can be insignificant as compared to the benefits involved. A significant avoidance that can be made is to engage machinery in terms of experts, and tools for your organization.
