Clive Humby famously said that “Data is the new oil.” But unlike fossil fuels, the amount of data in the world isn’t being depleted; it’s exploding. Each year produces more data than the last, and your organization is likely no exception. Big data promises to turn your data into valuable insights for your business through the power of data analytics, but the truth is a little more complicated than that.
Why Your Data Isn’t Ready for Analytics
The key to good business intelligence is to feed your data analytics software the right information. When you put garbage in, you get garbage out. Big Data services like to boast that you can just drop your data in and get flashy dashboards full of charts and graphs. However, if you don’t curate that data first, you’ll fail to reap the full rewards of BI software.
In fact, you could end up making poor decisions that are actually worse for your business if your input data is flawed or incomplete. If you want your BI investment to actually yield a good return, then you also need to make sure your data is available and organized before you start. Your data analysts will also thank you.
Turn Data Swamps into Pristine Data Lakes
These days, data is scattered all over the place. Workers save files on their home computers when they work remotely or forget to upload their work to the cloud or to your server. Employees struggle to follow your protocols and naming conventions. In short, your data is messier than you think.
Disorganized data becomes what we like to call a data swamp. Murky, sticky, and impossible to navigate, data swamps impede big data analysis and bog down your analysts’ days. But it’s possible to turn that swamp into a useful body of data. When you use the Aparavi Platform, you get a data lake so clean you can see your reflection in it.
Regardless of how your employees behave, with Aparavi you can find files with ease. You can add metadata to these files to make sure you never lose them again. But more importantly, it’s critical to find and identify all of your dark data. Unknown data can skew your analytics, and it’s imperative that you clean up your data before starting any BI project.
Redundant Data
Redundant data may not seem like a serious concern. After all, what’s so bad about multiple copies of files? When redundancy is intentional, for instance in routine backups, it’s an important part of your business. However, many redundancies are actually accidents.
Working files, temporary files, and even slightly altered copies can take up valuable space on your storage solution. This costs your business money and makes it harder for analysts to figure out which version of the file they should use.
Outdated Data
Outdated files have even more potential to corrupt your analytics. If your BI software is giving you intelligence based on old data, you could be making fatal mistakes when you analyze the results. Consider how flawed a marketing campaign would be if it based its projections on outdated user data. You need to make sure the data fed into the system is always up-to-date.
Unfortunately, most people are too afraid to delete anything at work. The last thing an employee wants is to get in trouble for losing valuable data, so they’re far more likely to keep old files lying around instead of throwing them away. This is why outdated data never seems to go away. You need a powerful search tool that can hunt it down and remove it for you.
Trivial Data
Trivial data is basically data you shouldn’t even have anymore. It’s useless. But, like these other kinds of data, it tends to disguise itself as something useful. For instance, maybe your employee started working on a file only to abandon it midway through. That file has an important sounding name. It might even be in a job folder.
Hidden Files
One of the biggest problems limiting your data analytics is that you just don’t have all the data you need. It’s often hidden across the various departments of your organization in the form of data silos. When one department’s files are only visible to the members of that department, you’ve got a silo that needs to be broken down.
Aparavi gives you the most powerful search tools and the ability to classify your company’s unstructured data according to your liking. Once you set it up, you can search through all of your files, regardless of whether they’re up in the cloud or nestled away on a local machine’s hard drive. The platform has also been designed to address the most common data management problems, including dark data, ROT data, and data silos.
Schedule a Demonstration
If you’d like to see how Aparavi works and how it can help your business, connect with us and Book a Demo today. Once you see what it can do, you’ll never be able to work without it.