Itamar Rogel

How the cloud (and structuring!) enables figuring out big data

Trying to describe the amount of data we produce is becoming more complex. We are now talking in petabytes, an extraordinary unit of digital data (with one petabyte equaling 1,000 terabytes). There are estimates that one petabyte equals 500 billion pages of standard printed text. Imagine that.

 

“We live in a post-corona world of data hyper-acceleration. 59 petabytes were consumed in 2021 worldwide alone. Everyone creates data, every day and all the time”, claims Ronit Atad, General Manager at Microsoft Israel. In a recent Calcalist business magazine conference, she mentioned that every minute, 6 million online orders are being made, 100,000 Microsoft Teams’ conversations are taking place and 500,000 tweets appear on Twitter”.

How the cloud (and structuring!) enables figuring out big data

For such handling of huge amounts of data, two elements are needed. First, there is the technical support, and that comes from “cloud computing”, namely the mechanism that enables the operations specified on the data. Cloud computing providers employ a “Software as a service” work model that allows customers to easily process the data.

 

The second element, other than the tech side, is knowledge of how to use the data. And that can come from platforms that help companies structure their data and understand it better. It is the combination of both technology and knowledge that allows businesses to better figure out such huge amounts of information.

 

A lot has been written already about the relationship between big data and cloud computing. But while the technology side of cloud computing progresses to handle such huge information quantities, it is the knowledge side of things that seems more problematic. As Mrs. Atad pointed out in her speech, companies only know how to use 5% of the data they collect while the rest of it goes unused!

 

Mrs. Atad simply was referring to the fact that companies are still struggling to comprehend their entire data streams and therefore lose insights and revenues. “The minute we realized we needed to focus on the cloud-within less than a decade-our stock share price leaped by sixfold”, she exclaimed.

 

A major part of companies’ databases revolves around their customer feedback. Millions of consumers post their reactions to products and services on a variety of online forums, review boards, and social media. The real-time data posted is unstructured. It is only the analysis of such data that turns it into a structured one, and that enables companies to figure out what their consumers are saying and to make actionable insights from such data.

 

Affogata provides companies with real-time structured data insights, tracked and monitored from many different open web platforms. The data structuring, based upon millions of consumer reactions, enables companies to better differentiate between positive and negative mentions, prioritize the more important issues from the less urgent ones as well as assist them in reaching more accurate business and product decisions.

 

In addition, businesses can better track keywords which show what are the current market trends to follow. They can also keep up with their competitors, as Affogata also tracks their rivals’ actions, based on what their consumers are saying. And finally, companies can learn what their brand sentiment score is and compare it to previous ones, telling them what consumers are thinking about their brand at all times.