Data Visualization: Overcome the Five Biggest Challenges of Big Data!

This excerpt from SAS Visual Analytics explains in great detail how Data Visualization is becoming an increasingly important component of analytics in the age of big data:

“Big data is set to offer companies tremendous insight. But with terabytes and petabytes of data pouring in to organizations today, traditional architectures and infrastructures are not up to the challenge. IT teams are burdened with ever-growing requests for data, ad hoc analyses and one-off reports. Decision makers become frustrated because it takes hours or days to get answers to questions, if at all. More users are expecting self-service access to information in a form they can easily understand and share with others.

This begs the question: How do you present big data in a way that business leaders can quickly understand and use? This is not a minor consideration. Mining millions of rows of data creates a big headache for analysts tasked with sorting and presenting data. Organizations often approach the problem in one of two ways: Build “samples” so that it is easier to both analyze and present the data, or create template charts and graphs that can accept certain types of information. Both approaches miss the potential for big data.

Instead, consider pairing big data with visual analytics so that you use all the data and receive automated help in selecting the best ways to present the data. This frees staff to deploy insights from data. Think of your data as a great, but messy, story. Visual analytics is the master filmmaker and the gifted editor who bring the story to life.”

Five Biggest Challenges of Big Data:
1. Meeting the need for speed.
2. Understanding the data
3. Addressing data quality
4. Displaying meaningful results
5. Dealing with outliers

Conclusion: As more and more businesses are discovering, data visualization is becoming an increasingly important component of analytics in the age of big data. The availability of new in-memory technology and high-performance analytics that use data visualization is providing a better way to analyze data more quickly than ever. Visual analytics enables organizations to take raw data and present it in a meaningful way that generates the most value. Nevertheless, when used with big data, visualization is bound to lead to some challenges. If you’re prepared to deal with these hurdles, the opportunity for success with a data visualization strategy is much greater.

For the complete version of this SAS Visual Analytics article and to test drive SAS® Visual Analytics, visit sas.com/visualanalytics