How streaming data is stopping businesses from closing their doors

A reported one in four small organisations twenty-four per cent have already temporarily shut down. Among those who haven’t shut down yet, forty per cent are reported to most likely close their doors. Forty-three per cent believe they have less than six months until a permanent shutdown is unavoidable. Furthermore, permanent closures have reached 97,966 in the UK representing 60% of closed businesses that won’t be reopening. Can streaming data help these companies during a crisis?

Organisations everywhere are suddenly thrust into rapid-fire decision-making mode when the pandemic struck. They needed to ensure workers’ safety and maintain business continuity—to mobilise teams for remote working, sustain operations (to the extent possible), manage customers channel partners, and steady disrupted supply chains—all while adjusting to seismic shifts in customer demand.

But to make the right decisions, companies need the right data, and they need it in a timely fashion. How many actually had it?

Data analytics secret weapon – streaming data

The world generates an unfathomable amount of data every minute of every day, and it continues to multiply at a staggering rate. Over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every single day, and it is only going to grow from there. By 2020, it’s estimated that 1.7MB of data will be created every second for every person on earth. Organisations, now more than ever, are quickly shifting from batch processing to real-time data streams to keep up with modern business requirements.

Streaming data — also called real-time data — is information that arrives continuously from various sources. By using stream processing technology, data streams can be processed, stored, analysed, and acted upon as it is generated in real-time.

Evolving approaches in response to unsettling times

Data collection is only one piece of the puzzle. Today’s enterprise businesses simply cannot wait for data to be processed in batch form. Instead, everything from fraud detection and stock market platforms to rideshare apps and e-commerce websites rely on real-time data streams.

Paired with streaming data, applications evolve to not only integrate data, but to process, filter, analyse data in real-time, as it is received. This opens a plethora of use cases such as real-time fraud detection.

In these uncharted waters, where the tides continue to shift, it’s not surprising that analytics, widely recognised for it’s problem-solving and predictive prowess, has become an essential navigational tool. Analytics can perform several functions organisations need: forecasting demand, identifying potential supply-chain disruptions, targeting support services for at-risk workers, and determining the effectiveness of crisis intervention strategies.

Real-time response to real-time pandemic

With the right analytics capabilities in place, organisations are well-positioned to facilitate operations and quickly harvest actionable insights from the wealth of enterprise data — data that is processed and updated regularly and in real-time. Carefully designed streaming data analytics algorithms, applied to data in analysing a specific business issue can dramatically reduce subjectivity and bias in supporting clearer-eyed decision-making.

Organisations that have already invested in streaming data and analytics platforms are now approaching the situation much more steadily than more. The “State of BI & Analytics Report 2020: Special COVID-19 Edition” revealed that analytics usage and business optimism are up as companies navigate the choppy waters of the new normal. According to the reports, businesses are leaning on analytics for business insights and efficiencies more than they did pre-COVID-19. It also found that 49% of companies are using data analytics “more or much more” than before the COVID-19 crisis. And for good reason.

Prevent closure with streaming data to power through the pandemic

Nobody likes uncertainty, but the novel coronavirus situation is a black swan event, the impact unexpected and still largely unpredictable, nearly 10 months into it. That being the case, perhaps it’s no surprise to see that data streaming analytics is driving value amid this cloudy landscape, as businesses search for order amidst the chaos.

According to a recent survey of 300 analytics professionals conducted by International Institute for Analytics (IIA), 43 % of respondents stated that analytics is at the front of their activities helping their organisations make major decisions in response to the COVID-19 crisis. These decisions aid organisations by not forcing their doors closed but finding alternate ways to optimise their operations.

For more information on how streaming data could help businesses from closing their doors, visit our website.

Sources:
Survey of 300 analytics professionals conducted by Burtch Works and the International Institute for Analytics
State of BI & Analytics Report 2020: Special COVID-19 Edition