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MCC 2011 Awardee

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Tuesday, February 5, 2013

THE "SMALL" IN BIG DATA


Ever heard the phrase " Small is Beautiful"? well that holds true when referring to my 3 years old Cousin "Toyosi", but you know what else it could be true about? Small and Medium sized businesses using Big Data Analytics techniques in better understanding and targeting their customers.

In the Past 2-3 years, the term "Big data" has been making the rounds among C-level execs and "a few of us"... lol but beyond all the Hype and grandeur, its really just large volume of data collected in real time for the purpose of analysis, Big data analytics is the process of examining large amounts of data of a variety of types (big data) to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations and other useful information. Such information can provide competitive advantages over rival organizations and result in business benefits, such as more effective marketing and increased revenue.

That said, then you'd agree with me that:
The collection of e-stores' visitors' shopping cart trends....is big data
A fruit juice company could collect ages of people who buy the product from a particular region....the result...big data.
or more realisticallty/practically:
A heartbeat monitor could be placed on Lionel Messi's heart to collect heart rate data in real time...which over time could be mined and correlated to be able to predict when he's in top form....the result...big data
Mouse clicks and momentary movements of visitors on a site could be monitored and collected in real-time for an e-commerce site to be able to predict the average transaction duration which might be in someway related to how the company plans for infrastructure growth...
i could go on and on..........

However, with this level of data collection and real-time monitoring required for Big data Analytics also comes the need for an elastic compute infrastructure model which is ASSUMED to be a luxury for just Larger companies that have larger data sets seem like ripe candidates for Big Data, but in many of these organizations their data are scattered across a wide variety of systems and platforms-and along with larger budgets and superior infrastructure come dramatically increased data quality issues. Smaller companies often have data that are more consolidated and, in some cases, have designed their systems and processes to generate and capture cleaner data.
At least half the battle of generating intelligence from data is having readily available data to begin with, so while your smaller organization might not be able to afford a massive Big Data initiative, you can start deriving actionable information from your data while the big competitor is still cleaning and consolidating.

A statement written by Techrepublic recently and rightly says:
"...like ERP, CRM, and other enterprise platforms, Big Data is rapidly commoditizing. Just as anyone with a credit card can subscribe to one of the cloud-based business software platforms and have Fortune 500 IT services in a matter of minutes, Big Data analytics are slowly moving out of the confines of the enterprise server room"

This spells Good news for the SMBs(Small and Medium sized Businesses).

Also, SMBs would initially feel disenfranchised by the High storage array and compute infrastructure with certain unavoidable costs to be incurred in joining the big data party, however on closer introspection, the viability of big data is seen when the timeline between the time the data is collected and the time it is analysed to make a useful decision is closer to being minute.
As we know, decision cycles and decision points are actually fewer in small organisations; another reason why big data could go "small".



Lastly, setting up the process, HW, SW, for the real-time data gathering takes  alot of discipline. Hence, the smaller the organisation,  the fewer "Big data envangelists" needed to make the company an ADOPTER.

So SMBs, Big data could be for you, lets start looking into how we could sow the seeds of real-time data collection and analysis and harvest intelligent decision making.

And if your wondering if your organisation qualifies as being called an SMB and not an ENTERPRISE or somewhere in between that continuum then that's really a story for another day.... :)

Thanks for reading



For the love of computers
  

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Stretching The Cloud LiiiiiiiiMiiiiiiiTS!


Recently, evangelizing virtualization and cloud infrastructure saw me speaking to an organization IT head who seemed to have the most insidious idea that by moving to the cloud, companies won’t ever have to worry about IT issues ever again. Various other chats reveal that people have somehow gotten into their minds that since their data or their servers or their applications are somewhere else, all their conventional technology issues are magically solved: cloud providers will back up the data, update software, deal with security issues, and so on. I hate to break it to you bud; nothing could be further from the truth.

For every layer of the cloud (Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service), the limits of the responsibility of the provider are clearly defined. In the case of infrastructure (IaaS), this limit is the hardware environment: the provider will guarantee network and hardware availability, and nothing else. Any other functionality is the sole responsibility of the user. You must set up backup for your servers, define and enforce any security policies, keep the systems updated, and do any other conventional server management task.
On the platform layer (PaaS), their responsibility is expanded: vendors offer a computing platform, roughly equivalent to an operating system, on the cloud. Their responsibility, therefore, goes as far as the functionality they make available. If you’re using a platform’s storage services, they will take responsibility for the availability of the data, replicating it as necessary, as well as for the performance of storage operations, and so on.
Finally, on the software-as-a-service layer (SaaS), vendors will take full responsibility for the entire application environment. This means not only the availability of the application and the underlying data, but also all the necessary infrastructure to make sure that they don’t lose your data, are hacked, or suffer any other issues that compromise your ability to access and operate the software.




Be that as it may, recent data breach incidents have proven that no datacenter is out of reach. Hence,organisations should get serious about their backup and restore process.Assuming someone else is backing up for you is a sure recipe for disaster.Some of the most notable incidents of 2012 were:
  • Global Payments (credit card processing), had hackers gain access to 1.5 million credit card numbers
  • LinkedIn had 6.5 million hashed passwords stolen and published online
  • eHarmony had 1.5 million passwords swiped
  • Yahoo had nearly half a million usernames and passwords compromised
  • New York State Electric and Gas had 1.8 million customer records hacked
  • Zappos had upwards of 24 million shoe-buyers impacted by a data breach
  • U.S. Army records for 36,000 military personnel were hacked
While the security implications of data breaches are clear, and tremendous damage was done, we also know that most compromised records were not lost. Hackers don’t generally destroy data. For the most part, they copy and keep the data they’re interested in exploiting for future gain.

But that’s not always the case, as we learned when Wired writer Mat Honan had his accounts, which had been backed up to the cloud, hacked and deleted. As a result, Honan lost all of the data on his smartphone, tablet, and laptop – all of his e-mails,contacts, documents, and most unfortunately, the photos that recorded the first year in the life of his daughter.

What made the Honan case particularly compelling is that Mat, just like many of  us, assumed that he was covered by having multiple copies of his data. Between his smartphone, tablet, and laptop, he had layers of data storage duplication. On top of this he assumed that by backing up to the cloud he was safe. Who would think to ask if the cloud itself is backed up?







MY ADVICE

A wise college professor once told me; "To get new ideas, read old books",  thinking of a solution to this tech quagmire takes me back to my college Sophomore year; organizations shouldn't break from the classic Father-Grandfather- Son backup strategy even whilst enlisted in a cloud service. the surefire way to protect your organization's data(whether you adopt a public cloud, private cloud or hybrid infrastructure) is to take responsibility for your own backup.

Whether you do it yourself or use a backup as a service (BaaS) strategy, the time to implement your backup strategy is now!





For the love of Technology
As a friend of mine cared to remind me;The content above is simply "my opinion" to be weight alongside varying opinions and the facts therein.