Big Data in IT

In the last weeks, I outlined several Big Data benefits by industries. The next posts, I want to outline use-cases where Big Data are relevant in any company, as I will focus on the business functions.
This post’s focus: IT.
Big Data is a hot IT topic. Not just because it comes from the IT, but also because it gives great benefits to the overall IT operations. In a recent project, I’ve been working with a large european corporation in the manufacturing/production sector. Their IT had some 400 IT employees, serving more than 50,000 corporate employees and operating a large number of servers that run specific services. A key challenge for them was reliability of their services. To find out how a service is utilised, large amounts of log data were analysed in order to find out how they can prioritise different services. This gave them detailed insights on where they want to move their services too since different services had different utilisation patterns. The company could improve their utilisation of servers. New services get integrated in that approach as well, which means that they are capable of delivering these new services without the need to invest in new hardware.
Another great approach – and another hot topic – is Big Data for IT security. With Big Data analytics, companies can find security issues before they become serious threads. Patterns on web site access can provide insights on DoS attacks and similar issues. These analytics are often provided in real-time and provide fast ways to react in case problems occur.
As described in today’s article, Big Data is not just a topic coming from the IT, it is a topic MADE for the IT.