By Jaideep Khanduja, Enterprise Technology Blogger, Global Mentor, and Founder and Director in India
It’s common knowledge that today, businesses wanting to remain competitive are collecting data. It’s simply impossible to compete in today’s market without the critical insights derived from data. In a recent survey conducted by the leading analyst firm, Frost and Sullivan, and commissioned by leading data collection platform, Luminati Networks, 54% of participants expressed the need for larger-scale online data collection in their operations. Of the 128 large enterprise decision-makers surveyed, almost half of the participants stated that they use data for business-critical operations, such as market research, while 44% stated they use it for competitive public data purposes.
Openly available online data now serves more industries than ever before as the entire world has shifted online. An example of one such industry collecting data at unprecedented levels is the finance sector. Investment firms, banks, and other financial institutions are understanding the need for more relevant and up-to-the-second streams of data. They are using alternative/external data such as social media posts and satellite imagery to gain a thorough view of the market. Doing soallows them, for example,to make more intelligent investment and loan-granting decisions as well as to drive revenue.
And it’s not just the finance sector that has had to regroup and rethink their data-driven strategies. Businesses from almost every industry have been increasingly turning to online data.
However, collecting openly available web data can become a complex operation. What’s available to you and I as consumers is not always the case for businesses. Companies wishing to protect their data from possible competitors often impose multiple challenges, even when the data collected is open and public. Businesses are often faced with being blocked or fed incorrect information. They are also often unable to access vital information due to their geographical locations. In fact, 24% of research participants talked about a lack of visibility into regional insights, and 22% stated that they were blocked from websites when trying to obtain publicly available data.
These numbers are not surprising when one considers that nearly two-thirds (65%) of businesses are yet to deploy enterprise solutions for collecting data at scale. When working alone, engineers are forced to focus much of their time and resources on trying to collect the data rather than on their core expertise and technology– and today especially, business resources have never been more important.
Data arms businesses with critical insights to make well-informed, split-second decisions. However, for businesses to be able to make these decisions, vital in today’s market, it’s critical that they’re able to access the most accurate data out there from any location in the world, as quickly as they need it. While this may seem like a daunting and complex operation for some, it doesn’t have to be – in fact, it can be as simple as ordering on-demand services. With advanced automated data collection solutions at businesses fingertips, they can do the ‘heavy lifting’ for them, bringing them the critical data they need whilst allowing them to focus on their core expertise and technology. Data really is the most powerful tool businesses have access to today, and with increasingly advanced, automated platforms that do the work collecting it for them, there’s simply no reason to stay behind.