In the 21st century, data is gold. Every business, large and small, tracks and manages its own data to continue thriving in today’s economy.
In the mid 19th century, the rush for gold may have been fueled by the hunger to possess the actual rock extracted from the cold, hard ground. However, most of the actual wealth accumulated during this time period ended up in the pockets of those who followed the prospectors and built businesses designed to serve them.
Hot on the heels of the prospectors were thousands of others who realized that fortunes awaited those who could provide services, provisions, and supplies to the gold-seeking crowds. Levi Strauss, Henry Wells and William Fargo, and many others built businesses that not only prospered during the gold rush but continue to be successful businesses to this day.
Today Data is Gold
These days, gold is found not by digging deep into the foothills and rivers of California, but by extracting value from mountains and streams of data that pour into storage repositories from companies around the world. Enormous quantities of data are generated every single day by companies doing business on the Internet. Even traditional brick-and-mortar businesses collect tremendous amounts of data from their clients in order to extract value by analyzing it to see trends that make or break their businesses.
If you are in business today, collecting, storing, and managing data in order to gain insight to improve your business is essential. Companies that can’t utilize their data to find insight into the workings of their business simply will not succeed in this modern, data-driven world. But like Levi Strauss and Wells Fargo in the gold rush era, even if you aren’t directly digging for data, if you can find a way to capitalize on data, you can generate a fortune that may last for generations.
The Modern Data-Driven Economy
Cloud-based tools such as business intelligence and data analytics that help you understand your data are available to help you leverage the data you already have. A mountain of information sitting in a database or in a huge spreadsheet is impossible to make use of without a little help.
Most companies, as they create their cloud migration services plan, make sure to include data analytics and machine learning capabilities to facilitate mining their data.
Using Data to Sustain Your Business
For instance, with data visualization tools such as Google Looker and the new Tableau integration you can analyze a mountain of data with relative ease. These tools are designed to ingest data by the gigabyte and present you with visualizations that can answer questions at a glance. The graphs and images that you can create with tools like these tell stories about your business, stories that you would otherwise never have discovered. You’ll gain valuable insight into questions like: How many people buy your products? Where do they live? Are there correlations between your sales and external events or conditions like the weather? What drives your clients to come back and buy more?
These are the stories that give you insight, and gaining insight allows you to make more accurate predictions and decisions for the future of your business. The best business is the business that is self-aware and committed to constantly learning more about itself. Today this is all done through data.
Manage and Analyze Your Data with Google Cloud
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