How Telcos Can More Fully Leverage Data For Maximum Insights
How can telcos gain more actionable insights from data? Find out.
We saw 4G LTE, LTE Advanced and 5G use cases drive the data explosion. With increasingly larger volumes of data from a growing number of data sources, businesses are experiencing increased pressure to meet user demand in real time and compete in a market where milliseconds matter, states Shahed Mazumder, global director of telco solutions at Aerospike, and emphasizes why and how telcos can gain more from their data.
According to IDC, there were over 43 billion devices connected to the internet at the end of 2020, which created or replicated over 64 zettabytes of data. The pressure is on to support accelerated growth and innovation — through data.
Winning at business today requires the real-time processing of massive volumes of dynamic data. What takes less than one terabyte of real-time data today can be 30 terabytes in 18 months. By 2025, it’s estimated there will be nearly 52 billion connected devices with more than 180 zettabytes of created or replicated data. With data as the foundation of every digital transaction, organizations that don’t embrace real-time data insights and delivery can expect to be left behind.
The aggregation of several telecom-centric use cases has led telcos to be in possession of tons of customer engagement data — data that drives immediate decisions in an impatient right-now economy. Telcos ingest, analyze and process these large amounts of data, and they’re stacked with future insights begging to be extracted. But, are the datasets really being leveraged to their full potential? And are customers benefiting from these powerful insights in real-time? Let’s explore a few priorities that telcos should consider to gain the most from the data they gather.
Embrace Unstructured Data: The Document Database
The exponential increase in types of data sources (thanks to the wide range of use cases from social media to gaming to the sharing economy and beyond) yields not only more data but more dynamic data that no longer can be classified into a finite number of buckets. As telcos expand their customer interactions through a constant online presence and real-time applications, they have become gold mines of unstructured data at a massive scale.
We estimate that 80% of today’s data is unstructured, growing at a steep rate of 60%. Unstructured data requires a database that can manage it — the sweet spot for the document database. It seems to indicate that the document database is gearing up to support a new generation of applications and insights..” Telcos can use document databases by leveraging unstructured data and the applications they support for a more flexible data environment. Complex data doesn’t mean unusable data.
Using a Graph Database for Insights
Establishing relationships between seemingly unrelated datasets can yield deeper, more sophisticated insights. You don’t need more data to gather new data. Instead, you can leverage the data you have and connect the dots between it. A graph database integrates data from a variety of sources and makes relationships between the disparate datasets. It accomplishes this by focusing on the connection between the separate entities and then surmising new knowledge from the information on hand.
Harness that data for more narrow targeting and more hypersegmentation as you build a complete profile consisting of data, and then extract new insights to continually innovate and evolve to serve your customers. Especially if the future of the internet is “cookie-less,” then consideration around what advertisements should be shown to which individual needs to heavily leverage graph databases to draw insights from people’s interests, social interaction and spheres of influence.
See More: How Telcos Gain Faster Data Insights with Data Mesh and Data Fabric
Keep Pushing Toward the Edge to Deliver in Real-time
Moving to the edge is not a new or novel concept, but it is an underused one. By moving more assets to the edge, telcos can more instantaneously deliver the real-time applications, transactions and insights that customers demand. Forrester has stated that 20% of data in an organization is real-time data and expects it to double in the next three to five years.
By moving data and queries to the edge, complex application functions can be done 10X-50X faster than with conventional application backends or content systems. Take content delivery as an example. When it happens from a centralized location rather than from decentralized edge ones, data requests lag, slowing the delivery process. Adding latency to a data request compromises the user experience.
While it can be costly to store data at the edge, it’s also costly to lose legions of customers who are dissatisfied with the speed of delivering a request. So, consider embracing the distribution of data processing locations to improve customer satisfaction and retain your customers. Besides, there are many real-time use cases that inherently require edge deployments. Interactive cloud gaming or image/video recognition are prime examples of them. For these use cases, the ability to serve in real-time, ideally less than 25 to 40 milliseconds, is critical to maintain relevance and effectiveness.
Streamline Infrastructure to Tackle Uncertainty
Though streamlining infrastructure won’t intrinsically impact data insights, from an efficiency perspective, it’s at the top of the list. An uncertain economic environment is driving leadership to ask data teams to find greater value while lowering costs to increase profitability.
There’s a renewed focus on shifting toward operating margin analysis by examining the total cost of ownership (TCO) rather than relying on traditional metrics. Companies are seeking modern approaches, which include deploying infrastructure with a limited amount of setup and maintenance and reducing the amount of servers required to process data to achieve lower TCO. At a time when every line item on a budget is under the microscope, maximizing output with minimum input is a universal priority.
While we have seen priorities shift from year to year or even quarter to quarter, it is clear that doing more with less has never been so desirable, which requires a modern, efficient approach. Just as 5G has driven and supported a more connected, real-time world, the world is demanding connected, real-time data. With telcos at the center of connectivity, they are poised to harness data more thoroughly for more comprehensive, impactful insights to deliver the highest quality efficiently and instantaneously.
Do you think telcos are ready to leverage data insights? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to know your take on this!
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