Using Data Gravity to Accelerate your Business

#DataGravity In an age where data is considered the new oil and technology companies account for the global top-five largest companies by market capitalisation – overtaking the oil conglomerates in the process – businesses need to give due consideration to how best to utilise data. One concept that is becoming particularly popular is called data gravity. Data gravity is the concept that, similar to how a planet exerts a gravitational force pulling other objects towards it, accumulated data draws further data and applications towards it. The term has been around for years, but few in enterprise really understand its benefits for their business. By its very nature, data gravity vastly improves the speed at which data is processed and communicated within a business. As organisations migrate infrastructure to the cloud, data outside the cloud begins to gravitate towards applications running inside it. As data is pulled closer to that infrastructure, organisations will experience reduced latency, increased application performance, and improved business efficiency. When data makes its way to the cloud, it will attract more applications and the data will become more valuable as its utility increases, it becomes a virtuous circle. Any enterprise, regardless of industry, can make use of data gravity. So how do you take advantage? There are three key concepts to consider when adopting data gravity: Latency: missing out by a second A defining concept of data gravity is location: the further your data has to travel, the longer it takes for the various pieces of your organisation’s infrastructure to communicate with each other. This lost time, whilst measured in only seconds, could easily mean hundreds of lost customers every day, depending on the size of your business. A 2015 Microsoft study found that since the year 2000, the average human attention span has decreased from 12 seconds to only eight seconds. Consider what this could mean for an advertising company. Long load times for ads could result in them rarely, if ever, being seen. Another study found that 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less and 40% will abandon a website that takes more than three. Data gravity reduces the effective distance between the relevant parts, reducing the time it takes for data to be transferred to the consumer. The more infrastructure, applications and data you have in the cloud, the more you can leverage data gravity to reduce latency and boost the connection to your consumers.

http://www.cbronline.com/news/big-data/using-data-gravity-accelerate-business/