How Big Data Will Change Businesses In 2018

In the world of analytics and computational data, two core concepts divide the medium — structured and unstructured data. Structured data is quickly and easily organized and searchable using basic algorithms and tools. Unstructured data, on the other hand, is more akin to human language. It doesn’t cram neatly into relational databases, nor is it necessarily compatible with algorithmic tools and search functions. In fact, those searches can either be simple, difficult or downright impossible to conduct. You never quite know what you’re going to encounter.

Machine learning, AI, and neural networks have completely changed the current landscape. Soon, there will no longer be a difference between structured and unstructured data. These technologies are making it increasingly easy to analyze, organize, scale and even accurately predict trends, all while using unstructured forms of data.

According to predictions from Forrester, 70% of enterprises are expected to implement AI over the next year. They’ll likely be able to use that AI technology to analyze unstructured data and create actionable insights from it.

This serves as the basis for some upcoming trends that offer incredible potential to all businesses – big or small – over the coming year.

Gartner describes dark data as “information assets” that a company may collect over time which they “generally fail to use for other purposes.” In short, it’s operational data that is coming in – like any other kind – but instead of being analyzed and put to use, it simply wastes away, stored in a database. The idea is that the data will be crawled “at a later date” when the business has better tools to extract insights from it.

Why would you be collecting and sorting data that you can’t put to use currently? It’s a natural thing that happens as you begin to monitor various customer habits and business processes. The beauty of it is that it’s stored for later, which can be incredibly beneficial for AI and machine learning systems. These tools can process and analyze all the collected data, eliminating the “dark” moniker. Say goodbye to data that’s going unused.

AI and machine learning are dependent on the cloud. You cannot have them without it. They both utilize cloud storage and cloud computing platforms to collect, organize and process data.