As our world becomes more connected, we have access to an increasing volume of data. This is exciting for organizations of all types. For example, retailers can begin to correlate customer data across multiple sources to identity shopping patterns. Utility companies can track usage throughout regions to optimize availability and avoid blackouts. And businesses of all sizes can experience faster growth, improved efficiency, and reduced operating costs by having greatly visibility into their operations.

Solving business problems in this way is known as Big Data for a reason. Big Data requires the ability to collect and analyze huge amounts of data, potentially terabytes or petabytes, depending upon the organization. The benefits can be significant to the bottom line. Big Data analysis can uncover hidden insights about how a business operates and how its customers act. Leadership can improve decision-making through access to enriched information. Many complex business processes can now be automated.

However, taking advantage of Big Data brings with it a new set of challenges. In addition to managing so much data, the network needs to be able to combine and analyze data from different sources quickly and at a reasonable cost.

The cloud offers many solutions for bringing the benefits of Big Data to businesses. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provides a flexible, programmable, and secure foundation for application development. Apache Hadoop offers a large-scale distributed computing framework that supports a wide range of data analytics tools to meet needs of every industry. These tools give users the ability to collect, explore, and analyze large data sets efficiently.

Businesses also have the option of implementing Big Data as a managed service. The primary advantage of a managed service is that an organization retains control of the security of its operations while a service provider handles the day-to-day details of implementing and managing operations.

For example, Cisco Metapod is an IaaS-based solution with enhanced OpenStack capabilities to assure superior stability, performance, and scalability. Cisco Metapod is offered as a managed service by providers such as Cloudwick.

Cloudwick offers Cisco Metapod as a managed Big Data platform combined with open source software and Cloudwick One to power Hadoop cluster administration, development, and advanced analytics. As the leading provider of open source, cloud and advanced analytics for modern enterprises, Cloudwick is also able to provide expert guidance on how best to deploy new and existing Big Data analytics applications to the cloud and manage them effectively.

Learn more about how Big Data can improve your business operations and help you understand your customers better.