Why data lakes are important for business analytics

Modern business professionals are finding themselves bombarded with claims about the importance of data lakes, but few possess the IT knowhow needed to make sense of this peculiar but fast-growing trend of their widespread adoption across the marketplace. As 2019 rapidly approaches, it's growing increasingly clear that data lakes are instrumental tools for deriving useful insights into consumer behavior and the motives and strategies of your competitors.

Here's why data lakes are important for business analytics, why you'll keep hearing about them more and more in the near-future and what business owners can do to prepare themselves for the next big market disruption.

Data lakes offer unrivaled access to huge sums of data

The information age is defined by data. The immense economic growth we've enjoyed over the past few years and the continued rise of digital tools in every facet of normal life is largely the consequence of businesses learning to make better use of data. If you can leverage more insights into consumer behavior than your competitors can, you'll always have a leg up in the market. That's why data lakes are going to grow more popular as time goes on as they're unrivaled when it comes to delivering you access to huge-yet-navigable sums of data that can be put to use towards lucrative ends.

Rather than forcing companies or aspiring entrepreneurs into stifling data silos, data lakes focus on providing businesses with unfettered access to a wide berth of information that doesn't discriminate based on perceived data importance. Data lakes archive information from just about every source they can identify, be it a business system or merely streaming data pulled from the web. The resulting mess of insights offered to business owners can be confusing, but it's immensely useful and jam-packed with minor tidbits that other approaches to data analytics miss completely.

As more companies come to understand the importance of leveraging data to make wise decisions, they'll realize they should ditch spending that isn't focused on comprehensive data lakes. While catering to a niche audience is often lauded as the only means of success in the modern marketplace, data lakes understand that you still need wide-ranging depots of info even if you're just trying to target a barely-detectable minority of shoppers.

The store-everything approach is the way of the future

If there's a concise way to summarize the role of data lakes as far as business analytics are concerned, it's the simple phrase "store everything." Traditional data warehouses let business owners and IT professionals down by categorizing information so narrowly and trimming away excess data so wantonly that plenty of otherwise useful business insight is flushed down the drain. This doesn't just cost businesses much-needed capital, but it also squanders opportunities they could otherwise profit from.

The fact that the store-everything approach is significantly cheaper than traditional data storage options like a data warehouse doesn't hurt the odds of data lakes growing more widely accepted as time goes on, either. Entrepreneurs who are looking to cut their costs to fund Dallas S EO projects will find data lakes an irresistible option, especially when it comes to competing with behemoths in the marketplace like Amazon and Microsoft who can draw upon huge sources of data themselves and are thus formidable foes.

As business analytics programs and the professionals who dominate the industry come to realize that predicting the future rather than just reporting on the past is what's really important for generating business insights, they'll flock to data lakes en masse.

The data lake is already becoming the new normal

Despite the fact that traditionalists in the marketplace are already lamenting data lakes as being too disruptive and optimistic to actually be viable, they've already become the new normal in many places around the globe. McKinsey recently issued a comprehensive report on the nature of data lakes, for instance, exploring the myriad of ways that business owners and up-and-coming professionals can make use of these data depots to gain a leg up on their competition. As the report wisely notes, many companies are still unaware of the best practices when it comes to handling data, so the rise of the data lake may be slowed by a lack of how useful they are to most businesses.

Harnessing actionable insight from huge swathes of data is never easy, even with the help of excellent computer programs and dizzying data gurus who can make sense of an otherwise incomprehensible swirling maelstrom of numbers. With the rise of data lakes quickly enthralling IT experts around the market, however, it's clear to see that business insight will soon be cheaper and more effective than ever before, with small mom and pop shops even getting in on the action. Expect to hear more about data lakes in the near future – as 2019 unfolds, we'll see that the growth of the data lake is one of the defining trends of the modern marketplace.