Clearing The Bar: The 3 Data Barriers Your Company Must Fix | Rayobyte

In their survey of over 500 senior executives, an Economist Intelligence United report found that although “there is a strong link between effective data management strategy and financial performance … extracting value from big data remains elusive for many organizations.”

This is evident from the fact that “strategic data managers” — those that have implemented a successful data collection, management, and analysis system — outperform their industry counterparts, yet 53% of those surveyed report using less than half the available data. Some even struggle with data collection and cleaning practices, proving they have much to learn before they can fully leverage their digital assets.

So what are the most common obstacles that prevent businesses from making the most of their data? So much goes into big data management that we can’t name every factor, but we’ve found that there are at least three hurdles that hinder best data management practices. Once you know which data barrier is holding you back, you can develop a strategy for clearing the bar. If you’d like to skip ahead, you can use the included table of contents to navigate the article.

What Are the Main Barriers to Big Data Implementation?

The three biggest barriers to big data implementation are typically communication, capability, and cost. Here’s what we mean by each:

Communication

In the world of big data, effective communication means adopting an efficient data sharing policy that delivers only the necessary information into the right hands while maintaining security and compliance.

There are two types of data sharing: internal and external. Internal data sharing is the transfer of data between departments, while external data involves transferring data from one business to another. An example of internal data sharing would be passing on lead data gathered by marketing teams to sales, while external data sharing would be collecting data from servers via web proxies and web scraping.

Best data sharing practices will vary according to where your assets are sent. Internal data sharing may raise the risk of sending data to the wrong users, granting access to those who don’t need to see it. External data sharing opens the opportunity to violate regulations that vary by industry, geography, or other factors, which can result in costly penalties.

One way to improve your data sharing policy is to use a web proxy solution that masks where your web scraping takes place. By sending requests with another IP address, businesses can ensure that the location of their data is kept private. This not only boosts security internally and externally but could help maintain compliance by safeguarding the source of the data.

Capability

From cloud-based storage platforms to the analytics tools used to dissect the data, implementing and maintaining a big data infrastructure is a tall chore for any company. Collection, cleaning, and storing are fundamental tasks to any data-driven process, and these can be hard to manage when they scale up to big data status. Add in the highly technical artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms used to analyze big data, and some companies may lack the workforce or expertise to manage their own systems in-house.

By using a web proxy platform, small businesses can take some of the burden of big data implementation off their shoulders. Companies that use web scraping with proxies can gather their data much more efficiently, as antibot measures will no longer obstruct them. Armed with the superior data collection abilities that web proxies provide, small businesses are free to focus on the other parts of big data implementation, like training themselves on advanced analytics methods.

Cost

As with capability, leveraging big data can come with a high price tag if companies decide to implement it all in-house. Many components of a big data infrastructure are too expensive for a small or midsized business (SMB), and the time-cost of implementation would bring business operations to a crawl.

Sourcing your big data needs out to a cloud-computing data management system can be much more cost-effective than in-house implementation, and you can outsource other parts of your operations as well. For instance, a web proxy solution can grant you access to a large number of proxies to help you scrape the web at a much more affordable price than obtaining all those IP addresses on your own. More IP addresses mean more web scraping — which means more data collection — at a price you can afford.

Proxies Help You Clear Big Data Barriers

Whether your barrier to big data implementation is communication, capability, or cost, proxies can help you clear the bar.

You may want to consider three particular proxies: data center, residential, and ISP. Each one offers unique advantages, so they can help you clear your data center barriers in different ways. Here are the details:

• Data center proxies. The least expensive of their kind, data center proxies originate from data centers. That makes them easier to detect, but they are also faster and can be used en masse for web scraping.
• Residential proxies. Rather than originating from data centers, residential proxies come from actual IP addresses. They are a bit more expensive, but their authenticity makes them harder to detect — though too many requests can still get them banned.
• Internet service provider (ISP) proxies. A combination of the above proxies, static ISP proxies originate from a data center but are authentic residential proxies. That gives them the speed of a data center proxy with the authenticity of a residential proxy.

Because we know that creating the right web scraping system from scratch can be a tall chore, Rayobyte offers Scraping Robot, a ready-made web scraping solution. That way, companies that lack the means to develop their own web scraping platform can still make use of this massive data collection tool — just one more big data barrier that Rayobyte helps companies clear.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re a new startup asking how small businesses can scale the big data barrier or an established enterprise looking to optimize your operations, web proxy solutions can help you make the most of the big data available to you. At Rayobyte, we provide ethically-sourced, affordable web proxies that empower your IT team to go big. Contact us today, and see what we can do for you.

The information contained within this article, including information posted by official staff, guest-submitted material, message board postings, or other third-party material is presented solely for the purposes of education and furtherance of the knowledge of the reader. All trademarks used in this publication are hereby acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.