It’s impossible to turn left or right these
days without hearing the words “big data”
or “cloud”—and for good reason. In order
to be competitive in today’s marketplace,
companies must make informed business
decisions that will produce real results,
whether those results are increasing
revenue, retaining customers, or improving
product quality. Big data is a key enabler
to making those goals happen.

IDG defines big data as "large volumes"

of awide variety of data collected from various
sources across the enterprise, including
transactional data from enterprise
applications/databases, social media data,
mobile device data, unstructured data/
documents, machine-generated data, and
more.” IDG goes on to say, “Data in high
volume, high velocity, and from a high
variety of information assets can deliver
enhanced insights and decision making.”

Big data enables organizations to
understand their business on a deeper
level and make strategic decisionsin real
time. In fact, 1 in 3 respondentsto IDG’s
2015 Big Data and Analytics Survey report
improved quality of decision making, and
better planning and forecasting as a result
of their big data initiatives.

But as with any new technology, there
volume and velocity. Bigger data that’s
changing in real time means existing tools
and approaches won’t work. Consider
also the sources: Big data comes at you
from, in some cases, literally millions of
places—customers,sensors, websites,
social media. You get the idea.

The old way of approaching this would
be to grow your capacity by building or
expanding to handle big data workloads.
That’s a resource-intense move—it’s
expensive, time-consuming, requires lots

of IT staff time and skills, and doesn't

allow your businessto move fast enough.
You can end up spending more time and
money on infrastructure than building
great products and solutions.

The cloud can help with a lot of these
problems. It comes as no surprise that
cloud and predictive analytics are among
the top three disruptive technologies
most likely to have an impact on

Organizations in the next 3 to 5

years. (The third isself-service IT.)
If you’re going to leverage predictive
analytics from big data, the cloud can be
a key enabler with many advantages.