Courtesy of CRN

Nathan Pearce gives his take on making the most of big data

Big data is being talked about by many in the IT community at the moment, and for good reason. Big data is probably one of the first cross-functional concerns shared by both IT staff and business stakeholders. So there is a big opportunity for resellers that can help businesses make better use of the data they have stored. 
Businesses are worrying about how to store it, how to mine it effectively, and how to share it with business owners to make decisions more rapidly. It's a competitive advantage for businesses when it is available, and a huge disadvantage when it's not.

As a result, many organisations, I think, are turning to cloud resellers to process, analyse and ultimately store big data, serving up its insights via services. Infrastructure that can make contextual decisions, as it were, can use services to tailor the experience for end users in a profitable way.

Organisations can track location and client-specific demographics as well as purchasing and browsing behaviour within web applications. Combined, mined and used, it can help design marketing campaigns and promotions.

Adding analytics on top of storage offerings can help businesses understand and use their data - yet many are overlooking the value of that same data as it relates to operations.

Resellers can implement performance and security features that can be activated automatically according to characteristics mined via big-data services. Security processes can be enhanced as visitors access applications from new devices or locations. Even more business-focused variables might trigger additional infrastructure activity.

Such capabilities could certainly reside wholly within the application tier, but more such functions are implemented as specific processes requiring collaboration across multiple services.

Application process routing can be enabled in abstracted layers of the infrastructure, making for a more flexible and adaptable architecture - especially as it consolidates the governance of such sensitive processes at a single layer of control instead of having that governance dispersed across multiple applications.

Big data is becoming a big deal and cloud is a major enabling factor.

Nathan Pearce is EMEA product manager at F5 Networks