Big Data

The amount of available data that is created and stored worldwide is still growing exponentially. It is generated by all kind of digital processes and comes from plenty of sources: systems, apps, social media, sensors, phones and newsfeeds. This way you can gather all kind of data. Too much to make sense of. Big data technology helps us to conquer all these pieces of information. By slicing and dicing through files and records, combining and comparing data. In the end, this will yield useful information for your business.

Big data, great results

Big data helps you to move your business forward. Gaining insights from a big data solution gives you a major advantage over your competitors. These days all successful companies use big data for their benefit. Companies that fail to use big data will fall behind.

No matter what the scale of nature of your business is, the possibilities big data offers are endless. Some examples:

• In Healthcare big data technology is used to monitor and predict disease patterns. With this information, medical specialists can make better diagnoses and treatments.
• Supermarkets and other retailers fine-tune their product assortment according to predictions generated from historic data, web search trends or even the weather forecasts.
• The local pizzeria can use big data analysis to optimize business. What impact do football matches have on the business? Which pizza’s are popular in summer? What is the most efficient route for the pizza drivers? Big data holds the answers!
• Big data is increasingly used for crowd management. No matter how big an event, with big data the guards, organization, police and other emergency services can easily keep track of the public, check the atmosphere and notice possible threats.
• The Dutch Railways use big data solutions to reduce the downtime of its trains. The performance of the trains is monitored constantly by using sensors that send information to a central system. This data is analyzed real-time by smart algorithms that predict where problems are likely to occur and action is taken.

Google for big business

No doubt Google’s Search Engine is the oldest and most well-known example of a big data tool. Each time you start a search, Google sifts through millions of websites to give you the right answer in no-time. It takes only a few seconds till a list of relevant results is displayed on your screen.

How does Google manage? By crawling and indexing, sorting and the use of intricate algorithms that are constantly analyzed and tweaked. And, by using a state-of-the-art infrastructure consisting of hundred thousands of servers, routers and switches.

The Google Cloud Platform now enables you the use this very same infrastructure and techniques to collect and analyze big data for your own business.

Diving in the Google Cloud

To work with big data you need a platform that can easily accommodate growing data and processing power. Storage space has become far less expensive in the last couple of years. Totally true, but the amount of available data is growing even harder. Building your own IT infrastructure is still a major investment. To be able to draw a lot of computer memory in a short time, you need a scalable environment such as Google Cloud.

The Google Cloud Platform is by far the best option when it comes to scalability, performance and reliability. It is not only suited for big corporate business. Also for your local grocery store GCP is the most reliable and cheapest platform in the world. Because Google only makes you pay for the capacity you actually need and use.

What about security or privacy?

Most businesses are reluctant to store big data in the cloud, especially when it concerns personal data on their customers. Understandably, but it shouldn’t be a showstopper. The Google data centers are totally secure so your data ís safe. Google has been working hard to convince the market it takes security and privacy very seriously. The Cloud Platform has been ISO certified for cloud security and privacy.

If you still don’t like the idea of bringing personal data in the cloud, it can be easily anonymised. This way your data can never be traced back to a single individual and/or company, but you can still use big data to gain insight into your processes, portfolio and markets.

Going realtime with BigQuery

On top of GCP, Google has developed some tools to process and analyze big data. So far Hadoop was the standard for processing big data. Hadoop however, is only made for batch processing. Google has gone a step beyond and came up with BigQuery. This Google tool is made to query large, distributed data sets in real time. No longer do you have to schedule batches that take hours to run. With BigQuery you always have the actual results.

With Google’s BigQuery you can process enormous volumes of data at rocket speed. Since it is running in the Cloud, you don’t have to worry about performance, database volumes or backups. You can totally focus on analyzing your data. On findings patterns and trends that help you grow your business and reach your goals.

BigQuery integrates with any tool hat can work with its REST API and it’s easy to use. It uses SQL queries and returns results in JSON format. Anyone who knows these standards can easily find his or her way around.

Google BigQuery and Google Drive

The BigQuery has been fully integrated with Google Drive. You can now:

• Save query results directly to Google Sheets from the BigQuery UI
• Query files directly from Google Drive, without first loading them into BigQuery.
• Query Google Sheets spreadsheets from BigQuery as you edit them in Sheets!
• Use your Google Sheets as tables in BigQuery, importing data has never been that easy.

How can Xinox Apps help you?

In a world as unpredictable and capricious as ours, staying ahead of your competitors is more important than ever. Big data holds the key. Most companies already have a lot of information from their administration, website traffic, social media channel and marketing champagnes. To use this data for your business, is a logical step and it might be easier than you think.

Xinox Apps delivers a powerful dashboard using Google BigQuery and Google Sheets to make your data work for you. We can develop dashboards for all kind of devices: laptops, tablets or phones. This way you always have the most actual information by hand.

Since we only work in the Google Cloud, the costs of developing ánd maintaining our dashboards are minimum. You don’t need to invest in developing tools or infrastructure. It is already there.

How can your business benefit from all the information that flows daily into your organization? The options are dazzling.

• Make better predictions on trends and sales
• Improve your products and services
• Find new market opportunities
• Personalize your offers
• Optimize Logistics and Planning

The big data solutions of Xinox Apps can provide all the information you need to tackle these issues. Just tell us what you need to know!

Xinox Apps

At Xinox Apps, it is our priority to help your business grow on a future-proof platform that is firmly based in the cloud. We have lots of experience with the Google Cloud Platform and firmly believe in it. GCP simply offers the best solution for your business. High-quality, low-priced and fast. Just like us!

If you’d like to know more about our services or the opportunities that GCP offers, please get in touch.

Wendel de Witte
Senior Cloud Architect at Xinox Apps
wendel.de.witte@xinox-apps.com