Data is generated every day, every minute, and every second. Whether you’re at home on the internet on the computer, standing in line at a fast-food restaurant watching YouTube videos on your phone, or even just watching streaming television, different types of data are being created. These data are then sent to companies, and businesses, giving a virtual stamp of you as a consumer.
Many companies sift through big data to find out more about their customers. Using advanced analytics, they use this data to create a picture of the end-user of their products. We’ll focus today on what big data is, and why certain businesses need it.
Big Data
We are surrounded by many forms of data in our lives. There’s data that’s collected on social media and the internet every time we perform some digital action. There’s data that’s collected when we complete a survey at a grocery store. There’s even data that’s created with the types of purchases which we make at retail outlets. This data is sent to a database for various companies where they take this large amount of data and turn it into a profile of you, and many other people. This data lake helps with focusing certain goods, or services to you based on the data you generate with your decision-making in day-to-day activities. So this begs the question, what is big data?
Big data is the huge and constantly growing data amounts that organizations can’t analyze through regular methods. This type of data includes both structured and unstructured data types. It also acts as the raw material for businesses to run analytics on, while also pulling insights about the data itself. Think back to the earlier examples listed above. When you spend money at a store, you are creating data for your credit card company about your spending habits. Often a collection of such data from multiple customers (in this case possibly millions to billions) is billed as big data. The companies sift through the different types of data in the hopes of using the advanced analytics duties of the big data research to glean usable information from it. They’ll rummage through the high volume of data, storing it in the interim in a data warehouse. Big data is a useful tool for the information gathering duties of many companies.
Insurance
The insurance industry utilizes big data on one big front. Big data helps to compile information about a potential insured. For instance, imagine you are obtaining medical insurance for yourself. You’ve decided to leave the services of another medical insurance company and to move on to another Medicare insurance agency or another insurance agency like Humana, or Kaiser Permanente. The new insurance company decides to check into your past data as a patient to find out what new insurance might best work for you. In addition to this, when you begin to visit doctors in your new health care network, you’ll begin to generate data about yourself. Utilizing big data technology, data analysis, and other machine learning, your insurance agency will be able to gear your insurance product to your specific health needs.
Maybe you’re a patient who is suffering from diabetes. With the big data which is accumulated over time, your health care provider, whether it be Humana, Medicare, or Medicaid, will better be able to prescribe the best treatment for you. Big data analytics can help save people’s lives and keep them well and functioning so that they can live long lives.
Streaming Services
As you watch endless amounts of hours of streaming television, big data is being compiled on you. Utilizing big data applications, streaming services like Netflix will learn what shows and types of shows you’re watching. Based on this big data technology and different types of data, Netflix will find shows to recommend to you based on what programs that you watched. This is an amazing way of creating relational data that can be used to entertain a Netflix user in the hopes that they stay a paying Netflix subscriber.
