3 Big Data Analytics Examples That Can Help Your Business

Industry leaders can use big data for a variety of purposes such as cost reduction, more efficient business processes, and the ability to better judge the needs of the customer.

Since 2017, at least 53% of companies have leveraged big data to make informed decisions—and that number is growing. Developments such as robotic process automation (RPA) are helping fuel this rise in big data, making it easier to sort through and process vast amounts of data.

Now, to remain competitive, analytics needs to play a significant role in the operations of a modern SMB.

We’ll be taking a look at the business case for big data analytics and how big data analytics can be used for competitive advantage—here are three different ways businesses can leverage big data, and how these big data analytics can have key impacts on the business processes.

1. Big Data Analytics Examples In IT

Big data analytics can be used for competitive advantage by supporting a robust IT infrastructure, which is vital to enhancing the efficiency of an organization while also ensuring cost savings and security.

So what exactly do we mean by this and how does business analytics contribute to business value?

Analytics support the creation and deployment of a more robust IT infrastructure by giving professionals the tools they need to stay on top of everything. In particular, IT leverages analytics in two primary ways:

Network performance

Analytics shed insight into network performance for things such as traffic, speeds, uptime and downtime, user habits, and even the printing environment.

Using the data collected from this monitoring, IT professionals can help understand the movement of traffic across a network, and managers can tweak processes as needed to encourage efficiency.

This is done by a software engine assessing data from a variety of sources, like connected devices, servers, and the flow of traffic.

Network analytics helps your IT team spot bottlenecks early, check the health of devices under network, and fixing issues as they arise.

From an operational standpoint, the network analytics we’re talking about is automated and compared against how your network should be performing. If, during analysis, your network is found to deviate from operating at optimal capacity, the information fed to your IT team helps them discover what issues are slowing you down and how to remediate them.

In other words, the use of network analytics allows you to ensure that your operations are running smoothly at all times, catching network performance issues in real-time and keeping costly downtime to a minimum. This is a good example of big data analytics which is frequently deployed by SMBs today.

Cybersecurity

Cyberattacks are increasing—some 95% of IT decision makers believe they are susceptible to external threats. Analytics are most frequently deployed to study the behavior of breaches in order to predict the next one.

It’s historically been incredibly difficult to predict a cyberattack.

However, according to the IDC, big data may be just the key which the industry needs in order to provide analysis and shed light on best practices for avoiding attacks.

Data can be analyzed and used to determine, for example, when users are most frequently working in order to understand what unusual activity might warrant an alert to be checked; a login attempt at a strange time in this case.

This is done by analyzing big data sets, both current and historical, and using machine learning to help the system understand patterns and trends.

The more data your business is able to analyze, the stronger your defense. Through big data analysis, your security solution can build a clear picture of what’s “normal” in your business—who logs on when, who has access to what information, data handling behavior.

This makes it a lot more difficult for cybercriminals to target businesses that utilize big data analytics, as any deviation from predicted patterns in the business network will be flagged and tracked by IT.

This is a common technique that is used in threat hunting cybersecurity solutions which you’ll find in many MSSP offerings.

2. Big Data Analytics and Marketing

Analytics first arose in marketing as companies began to uncover how to entice customers best to respond to their advertising efforts—through value propositions and calls-to-action.

Since then, analytics have proven useful in marketing for several reasons. Big data analytics can be used for a competitive advantage by:

• Helping companies get a better sense of market segments and potential audiences
• Providing more in-depth insight into customer behavior and preferences
• Experimenting with new products and better marketing approaches
• Revealing the best strategies for augmenting the user experience
• Making A/B testing easier
• Assisting with the optimization of pricing strategies

With markets and consumer preferences so rapidly changing, it’s critical to be constantly testing new ideas. Analytics make the entire process easier by providing pointed clues into what works and what doesn’t.

For example, big data analytics can help provide information on what particular customers are most interested in, and that information can then be used to target them with more specificity in your email campaigns.

3. Analytics with Employees

In addition to finding what works for customers, big data analytics can provide a competitive advantage by offering insights into the best strategies for encouraging productivity in the workplace among staff.

More and more businesses are using analytics to identify the best way to drive employees to work more efficiently.

Deloitte recognized the use of People Analytics as a significant trend beginning in 2017 and carrying onward through 2018. In particular, analytics finds use in human resources for purposes such as:

• Sorting resumes and cover letters during the hiring process
• Analyzing video interviews to assess a candidate’s personality
• Spotting patterns of behavior in employees and departments
• Tracking the real-time effects of training and employee coaching
• Identifying areas of payroll leakage or poor hourly time management
• Collecting performance data for employee energy, wellbeing, and pain points
• Ranking employees by quality and reliability

In other words, analytics within the workplace helps companies gain a much better sense of exactly how their employees work, and how to support them to drive productivity to the next level.

As theories about the ideal workplace change, big data can help companies make informed decisions about the communication environment, processes, and workflows they create for their workers.

For example, if your data insights are showing you that your customer support team is spending an inordinate amount of time answering the same customer queries again and again, you could create an FAQ section on your website that answers those repeat questions.

Better still, you could implement a chatbot, which you can program to answer these queries in real-time for customers.

The end result is that staff are freed up and able to spend their time on tasks that need a human touch.

The same can be applied to virtually any environment; even the warehouse floor.

If analysis determines that workers are following an inefficient process, you can now see this in your insights, and work to rectify it, whether through a change in policy, or maybe even a custom app which addresses a specific workplace bottleneck.

The point here is that data analytics helps uncover working processes that were previously an invisible drain on your operations.

With this increased visibility, decision makers have actionable insights which they can use to effect change.

How These Big Data Analytics Examples Provide a Competitive Advantage

At its core, these big data analytics examples show how data analysis can make businesses more cost-effective, efficient, and competitive in their market.

SMBs are the most likely to leverage data and analytics software to gain a competitive edge.

When done correctly, analytics and big data work together to provide valuable business intelligence on your processes and provide you with new opportunities.

In IT and cybersecurity, data analytics helps companies stay ahead of threats to keep their customer, employee, and company information safe, a particularly important consideration for today’s cybersecurity environment.

In marketing, big data allows companies to go straight for what works, leaving guesswork out of the equation and allowing businesses to nurture leads and customers with more precision.

Finally, internally, the use of big data helps rid companies of dated processes which may have negative impacts on efficiency in business operations.

This is especially the case with manual processes, many of which can be alleviated through employing automation solutions.

Every business should be using big data to identify critical metrics, potential problems, and insights on their customers.

These analytics assist in moving a business forward by providing essential insights across the breadth of a company.

From IT to human resources, big data is becoming increasingly vital for its business impacts that enable companies to make informed, cogent decisions to drive productivity and profitability.

Managed Services for Big Data

Managed services for big data is a way for businesses to get started with implementing analytics programs to leverage their data.

Organizations today understand the importance of using big data analytics for a competitive advantage, but often lack the expertise and tools to implement the necessary solutions to get a plan in place.

For this reason, many businesses use managed services for their big data so they can begin to utilize the large amounts of underused data they house.

Impact Networking offers a Digital Innovation managed service, where businesses let us handle the backend tech implementation while they can concentrate on the added benefits big data analytics can bring to their operations.