The topic of “Big Data” gets a lot of attention in the IT media, focusing primarily on the massive amounts of data captured by enterprise businesses and how it gets managed. Small and mid-sized businesses are also beginning to accrue significant data stores of their own with the potential to gather many valuable business insights. However, as the volume of data grows, it tends to become difficult to manage. It is also challenging to quickly extract useful information from large volumes of data. One primary source for the accumulation of data is from web interactions, whether through ecommerce activity or through other methods.
Web Data
Data from web interactions can be easily captured and analyzed on demand by cloud-based services. The clear leader in that space is Google Analytics. The platform is simple to implement with a code snippet added to web pages for tracking visitor activity and website statistics. Google Analytics is already integrated into web development platforms like WordPress and many other hosted web and ecommerce services. New services like KISS Metrics (www.kissmetrics.com) seek to extend the functionality of Google Analytics by identifying individual customers that visit, and providing detailed metrics on their interactions.
Other Types of Data
Other types of data that are candidates for analysis, range anywhere from clinical trial data to sales results to wind velocity readings – whatever your business’ particular information systems might gather. When there are potentially gigabytes of data to crunch and analyze, services like Amazon Web Services offer a cloud-based means to analyze these data stores. They offer virtually unlimited on-demand computing resources in the cloud to power the analysis process. Their services, like Elastic MapReduce, can run through massive amount of data in minimal time.
We recommend trying these services as many are free, or offer a free trial, either for a period of time or up to a certain data size threshold. For more information on analytics on demand, contact Superior Technology Solutions. We look forward to sharing our extensive technology background with your organization. For more information, visit us on the web at Superior Technology or call us at 845-735-3555.
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