Lorna Hardie, HP South Africa Software Country Manager, says the proliferation of unstructured data - in the form of messages, social media content, voice conversations and more - is phenomenal and growing daily. The potential business value of these vast volumes of data is now being realised by pioneer enterprises around the globe. "It is estimated that only around 20% of the data in circulation is structured data - typically that which resides within enterprise databases. This means enterprises not harnessing unstructured data are using a very small percentage of the actual available data."
Hardie says while South African enterprises are aware of big data analytics, many tend to sideline it while they prioritise areas such as IT operations and security and governance. Ironically, big data analytics could be playing a crucial role in addressing operations and security concerns, she says. "Local uptake is still slow, and many enterprises tend to go back to a traditional BI approach for gaining insights into their data. However, once evidence of ROI starts emerging from the enterprises innovating with big data analytics now, uptake should increase dramatically."
She notes that enterprises prioritising governance and risk could be using big data analytics to gather logs and events as well as further identifying emerging trends and flagging anomalies, so reducing fraud and improving governance. "With big data analytics, you could, for example flag an individual leaving a company who suddenly starts accessing IP he never accessed before. You can pick up issues earlier in cycles, and so reduce risk."
Enterprises seeking to drive operational efficiencies can use big data analytics for infrastructure and performance monitoring, enabling the enterprise to pin down the exact times an activity started, or what triggered a chain of events, be it application or infrastructure, allowing management to improve processes and boost operational efficiency.
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