Today we will cover the final two misconceptions as laid out in IBM Systems Magazine’s May 2015 article “Infrastructure Matters: Myth or Truth”.
Number nine on the list is “big data and analytics is only about social media analytics”. Yes, gathering and studying social media analytics is a big trend these days. Organizations are continuously analyzing data on who is engaged on their social media channels. However, big data and analytics goes well beyond just social media. In today’s electronic business world, the rapid collection of data is commonplace in all areas of operations. The value of that data is in the analytics…truly understanding the data and what it means. With the right infrastructure in place, businesses can analyze all types of data to gain insight into their customers, markets, products, regulations, competitors, suppliers, employees, etc. – not just who “liked” or “re-tweeted” them.
The 10th and final myth is that external storage is not needed. All you need is Hadoop (the open source framework designed for distributed storage). Hadoop does provide access to unstructured data, but that’s not the only data that might be relevant to making good business decisions. Having a robust infrastructure that consists of your existing systems sitting on offsite storage and enterprise-grade storage for mission-critical workloads, will enable you to analyze data when and where you need to.
IBM Systems Magazine did an excellent job of breaking down the many misconceptions of a cloud infrastructure in their article. Hopefully, now those who have shared some of these misconceptions will realize the numerous benefits a cloud-based IT infrastructure offers to help improve business outcomes and increase value.