Big data is one of the key trends in the world of technology today. The shift from analogue storage (such as paper, film and tapes) to digital storage has meant that it is now easier than ever to hold large quantities of data. Furthermore, as smartphones, cameras and IoT devices (just to name a few sources) gather more information through in-built sensors, the amount of data that is produced on a day-to-day basis also continues to grow. But how can an organisation make sense of all this available data, and use it to its advantage? In this blog post, we will take a closer look at how Amazon Web Services and Microsoft can help.

AWS and Big Data

By its nature, big data requires large computing capacity for storage and analysis. Hence the reason why Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) extensive infrastructure is an excellent starting point for an organisation. Amazon Simple Storage Service (otherwise known as “S3”) allows you to easily store your data securely, with prices that are less than $1 per gigabyte. If you are looking for a larger-scale data warehouse though, Amazon Redshift offers a fully-managed service which can handle petabytes of information (for comparative purposes, a petabyte equals 1 million gigabytes). You will find that this service is also quite affordable, with Redshift available to businesses at a price of $1,000 per terabyte per year.

In terms of analysing the data you have in AWS, there are several tools available to you. One worth mentioning is QuickSight, which is a business intelligence (BI) platform that can quickly and easily generate visual graphics, perform analyses and generate insights. This platform is underpinned by Amazon’s Super-Fast, Parallel, In-Memory Calculation Engine (SPICE). Furthermore, this analytical information can be generated at 1/10^th the cost of traditional BI solutions.

Microsoft and Big Data

As an alternative, Microsoft also provides outstanding tools to help organisations manage big data. Their Azure cloud platform is an excellent choice for online storage, providing a range of options such as their Table Storage for semi-structured data, or Blob Storage for more unstructured data. If you require a larger-scale solution, Microsoft’s SQL Data Warehouse can be setup in only three to five minutes. Additionally, Microsoft offers the Azure Data Lake platform which can store and analyse a wide variety of files; even data in the petabyte size.

On the analytics front, Microsoft’s Power BI platform is a great tool for organisations to create clear visual representations of their data. This data can be presented in a dashboard format, allowing you to gain a solid understanding of the metrics that matter. Power BI is available on desktop computers, mobile devices and online. Another option to consider is Microsoft’s SQL Server. The latest version of this platform was released in 2016 and offers an excellent range of tools which are underpinned by the R programming language.

In conclusion, we believe that big data is an important component of the modern business world. The possibilities that can be unlocked when organisations can successfully collate, store and analyse this data is vast, so we would encourage you get in touch with Comunet to discuss how big data can change your operations in the future. We look forward to helping you generate big results through big data.