Results tagged “big data” from The Savvis Blog

It's no secret that as companies' information assets continue to explode, the need to unlock the value of data grows more pressing.

This week, Intel announced the availability of the Intel® Distribution for Apache Hadoop software (Intel® Distribution), which will give more organizations the ability to make use of the vast amounts of data that are generated, collected and stored. I was pleased to participate in the event and extend a longstanding successful alliance with Intel and the other companies on stage.

Where will you be one year from today? Where will your IT organization be? What do you need to know to get there?

Last week, Savvis experts weighed in on what 2013 has in store for interoperability in the cloud, data centers that do more than house data, and growing pressures on developers and the financial industry, respectively.

Financial services firms are increasingly facing the challenge of big data: Unprecedented quantities of structured and unstructured data stored in a variety of systems and formats.

Though "big" might mean hundreds of gigabytes for one company and hundreds of terabytes for another, all companies report that more data is coming in all the time from disparate systems. For example, in a recent survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit, 73 percent of respondents in the financial services industry say that data collection has increased in the last year.

Big data presents a big challenge for financial services firms. The sheer amount of storage required to keep it strains IT infrastructure, crowding physical storage capacity. Worse, big data overwhelms management capabilities.

In the same survey, nearly one-third of respondents admit to insufficient data governance practices. Due to the scale and heterogeneity of big data, firms often can't be completely sure that they've locked down compliance with regulatory and other requirements -- and this worries them, because they know that it opens them up to potential legal challenges.

Because big data is so unwieldy, companies are often not able to put it to use. The explosion of big data has affected all industries, but the capital market has its own unique set of issues, such as the need to capture time-series data and merge it with real-time event processing systems. This and other challenges unique to financial services complicates IT's struggle to deliver important data to the right people within an acceptable timeframe. Nearly one in four financial services respondents in the Economist survey said the vast majority of its company's data is untapped, and another 53 percent said they use only half of their data.

But though most financial services organizations aren't able to put big data to good use, they know that it has potential to be enormously valuable. The Economist Intelligence Unit survey shows a strong linkage between effective data management strategy and financial performance, with companies that use data most effectively standing out from the rest.

Savvis recently published a white paper that discusses these issues, including use cases that show how partnering with innovators can open new opportunities. Key areas addressed include:

- How effective management of big data can make a difference

- What's keeping firms from making the most of big data?

- How Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers can help to resolve technical challenges

Please click here to download the white paper.

Varghese Thomas is global head of financial services at Savvis.

The rapid growth of big data as a new category of "must have" solutions is hard to refute. Airport walls are now adorned with billboards selling the virtues of big data and almost every major IT provider has jumped onto the bandwagon to offer, or re-position, its products for this market. Case in point - I recently attended the Hadoop Summit and almost every major brand spoke about how it is leveraging and/or delivering big data solutions. Also, most of our customers are telling me that managing and harnessing their data assets are critical to the success of their companies.

The availability, accessibility and volume of data are growing exponentially while technical problems and business use cases are becoming more complex. Fortunately for companies, with these new technology solutions all data can more easily be visualized and analyzed in real-time and a paradigm for correlating and integrating information to create new insights is much more accessible.

Big data solutions allow customers to use their data to do even more powerful things than analyzing and modeling large volumes of information. These solutions allow all data types, including structured and unstructured, to be assessed and analyzed in new and unique ways. Equally important is the integration of legacy systems with social media data. Combining these solutions with virtualization and the cloud benefits can empower just about everyone in the business to affordably analyze large amounts of multi-structured data. For instance, big data solutions:

- Enable organizations to assess structured and unstructured data in their raw form and without the need to pre-model

- Remove the boundaries on what information can be analyzed

- Shorten the time-to-insight, especially as new data sources are added

- Improve the effectiveness of marketing and promotional campaigns by helping companies refine pricing models and lower overall customer acquisition costs

- Construct a complete picture of a company's customer to ensure the right message and products are being pitched to the best audience

- Combine transactional sales data with unstructured comments (e.g., product reviews) to provide insight into purchase behavior

- And much more

Given our customers' needs, we too are expanding our solutions to include big data capabilities. Recently Savvis entered a strategic agreement with Hortonworks, a leading commercial vendor providing innovation, development and support of Apache Hadoop. This agreement enables Savvis to offer cloud-based big data solutions for enterprises and provide customers with a way use our infrastructure with Hadoop to create valuable information through the searching, indexing and analyzing of sizeable quantities of information assembled from multiple sources.

What are you hoping to do with big data in your company? In subsequent blog posts, we will dig deeper into how cloud solutions can help with your data requirements.

Steve Garrou is vice president, global solutions management, at Savvis, a CenturyLink company.