Businesses are woken by data reliance and security solutions to protect them. Over the last decade, the revenue invested by the top 100 companies in the world towards data analytics solutions has reached a whopping 58 percent that is more than half of the revenue generated is spent on data. The prime driver for business leaders is that data is offering significant opportunities by embracing Artificial Intelligence (AI) could offer- from getting incremental in employee productivity to improving customer service.  The second major benefit with Artificial Intelligence (AI) is that it offers the decision-makers with an opportunity to use the technology to gather fresh insights from data. To embrace, the opportunities and significant impact of different technology on the operation, businesses need to deliver strategies that could embark the digital transformation. Businesses have been skeptical when it comes to digital transformation or even adding new technology to their daily operation but having a right strategy will create an able solution to harness all the information that is typically gathered and processed by businesses today is a clear and useful manner. But where do business leaders need to rethink when it comes to building their data strategy to deal with all current technology barriers.

Getting to know the data

Identify where exactly is your data stored and how. List down all the different formats in which you would have those data; most firms would have word files, images, emails, and even videos. Without having a clear view of the data, you could be missing out on all kinds of opportunities to utilize the data. Some businesses have a deal with different kinds of customer data that affects the complete cycle of data utilization, where they have segregate the data before utilizing them. Once you have completed your data audit, your next aim should be to keep all the data within the centralized repository that can be easily accessible. Cloud-based services are an ideal place to start as they need much lower capital when it comes to outlaying the required infrastructure when it comes to storing the data using a complete on-site solution. Ideally, organizations of all sizes should invest in infrastructure technology that should be fulfilling the business requirements and assisting the business to scale-in both capacity and performance. They have to ideally think about which format they need their data to be opportunities while using it. Using a translation tool such as Kafka will completely transform the companies to manage the data from different applications. It’s imperative that all the information or data is being held together at a single point of contact, the security will become a major issue with that as the businesses have to deal with several major issues. A solid backup and recovery plan is, therefore, imperative when creating a vital element for the complete data strategy.

Time for making the data regulated and clean

Business leaders, when deciding upon the data analytics solutions and data disparities they need to understand that data is of value and a business proposition. It’s not only important when it comes to meeting the GDPR, but it also results in rapid wastage of time and money that is imperative to store all the decade-old data that will no longer add any benefit for the business.   Finding such type of data in the complete database and destroying them would mean that business is investing in the data that will bring operational efficiency rather than just wasting the money infrastructure. Data regulations in another part of a coin when it comes to data analytics, the recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that makes the companies are responsible for EU citizens personal data and need of satisfying the compliance requirement for the business. The Facebook hearing of Cambridge Analytica using the user data points to affect the results, where a fine of $5 billion was laid on the social media giant. Compliance and regulations across different boundaries will become the required check-mark every business using data analytics needs to satisfy.

Here are certain requirements that need to satisfied for GDPR compliance.

1. Requiring the consent of subjects for data processing.

2. Providing data breach notifications.

3. Making the data collected from the user anonymous.

4. Bringing secured options when transferring data across borders.

5. Appointing data protection officer to oversee the required GDPR compliance across the complete company.

Companies that fail to satisfy the above criteria will have to pay hefty fine depending on their revenue.

What do you need from data?

Analytics based on factors can be a tough choice to make; business leaders need to decide which analytics tools can provide the required insights for business operation. Building your own tool or having a third party analytics solution work on the data will have to deal with different requirements.  Once the data is stored in a specific location, you need to plan your data based on what insights you need from the data? Experimenting with different data analytics tool would give a better view whether you are looking at the right insights about the data or whether the data set is right, many experts revealed of using the analytics tool on the smaller set of data to decide the right questions, whether the right algorithms could answer the questions. The ultimate aim of any data strategy is to build a single incremental of truth on the complete scenarios.

Conclusion

Data can be your solutions if right storage and tools are used if businesses fail to analyze their requirements looking towards their present and future storage requirements would mean operational dissipation of data. Analytics will bring other business solutions such as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, increasing your scope of business operation.

To know more, you can download latest whitepapers on data solutions.