Together with cloud computing, social computing and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Big Data is one of the IT buzzwords of 2012. But what actually is it, and what are the impacts and opportunities for your business and data security?
What is Big Data?
Big data refers to the explosion in the size, speed and variety of data that companies now need to manage.
This can include so many different things – email, social media updates, images, videos, mobile phone data and much more.
Take email for example. Research from the Radicati Group forecasts that worldwide email users will reach 1.9 billion by 2013 (up from 1.4 billion in 2009). There will be 507 billion emails sent each day in 2013 (more than doubling the 2009 figure of 247 billion).
How about Twitter? Midway through 2011, there were 200 million tweets being sent every single day. This figure was only 2 million in 2009. That’s a lot of data!
The vast majority of data in the world today was created in the last two years.
But how does big data affect (small and large) businesses?
Why is Big Data Important?
Big data is important because data is a valuable commodity. Just look at Facebook’s IPO of $104 billion and their purchase of Instagram and its 30 million users.
Within your company’s data, there is a whole host of intelligence, which – if managed efficiently – can be used to improve processes, drive sales and grow your business.
Manipulating big data can make your business more agile and more responsive.
But how do you cut through such vast quantities and variety of data to create real value?
The Cloud: Friend of Big Data
Cloud services are good friends to big data. They help you organize data in an intelligent and actionable way.
Go back to the example of social media. With over 200 million tweets sent every day (works out to be well over 2,000 every second), trying to manage multiple social media profiles can prove difficult. Driving value into your business can be equally tricky.
You can use cloud-based applications such as HootSuite and TweetDeck to manage all your social media profiles in one place. It’s the easy way to discover and emulate the key influencers in your market.
It’s a similar story with web analytics. Cloud applications allow you to discover which pages turn your customers on and which repel them.
Likewise, in customer relationship management (CRM), Salesforce and other software systems allow you to cut through big data to drive value into key accounts by presenting all communication in an actionable and intelligent way.
And when it comes to the complex area of email management, MailGuard is considered king by thousands of customers across 27 countries.
Big Data: Security Challenges and Opportunities of Managing Email
Managing email is a major challenge for small and medium sized businesses. Not only are email volumes rising dramatically, but the size of emails is expanding as attachments so often contain multimedia files.
These days, most organisations use email filtering. If they do not, or if their choice of filter is not working effectively, then their users and their network have to deal with spam, which makes up 80% of all email. This can slow down computer systems, make teams unproductive, and lead to system downtime.
Find out more: MailGuard Email filtering
Meanwhile the costs of data storage, transmission and backup also escalate. Companies who must retain email to be legally compliant are feeling the strain. They need a cost effective way to store email that frees up their network and systems.
Our SafeGuard email archive not only retains your messages for seven years, it also provides valuable business intelligence through state of the art discovery and lighting fast search functionality.
There’s also the risk of confidential data being leaked. By setting up rules in the MailGuard console, you can customize right down to the individual user level, to specify which files can and cannot leave your organization.
If you’d like to see how MailGuard can deliver all the benefits of big data, whilst overcoming its challenges, you can try us free for 14 days.
