Recent research conducted by IDG Connect suggests that there is a definite move towards big data projects in Kenya and Nigeria. According to this research, 64% of respondents are at planning, pilot scheme or live stage of Projects. It is indicative of the increasing level of interest in big data, big data analytics and the relevance of the cloud to enhance operations and accelerate growth in the enterprise.
For many years, businesses have been making decisions based mainly on transactional data (who bought what). Beyond that critical data, however, is a potential treasure trove of non-traditional, less structured data: blogs, social media, email, sensors and photographs that can be mined for useful information.
Big Data gives a business the ability to spot market trends, capitalise on business prospects and to target products better than ever before.
The affordability of both storage and computing power has made it feasible to collect this data – which would have been discarded only a few years ago.
Many companies, as a result, are looking to include non-traditional yet potentially very valuable data with their traditional enterprise data in their business intelligence planning.
To generate cost-effective results from Big Data, enterprises need to look beyond on-premises IT to cloud computing.
Practicality and cost are two key drivers behind cloud adoption in Africa. The cloud is perfectly suited to Big Data with massive storage, elastic expandability and pay-as-you-go billing. Instead of maintaining costly infrastructure, cloud computing allows the user to pay just for what is used when it is required.
Industry analysts have referred to predictions by Gartner and reaffirmed the belief that the adoption of public cloud services will continue to escalate amid continued efforts by organisations to drive down IT spending.
