What is the difference between big data, analytics, and insights?

By Nelson Ikechukwu Nworie

You’ve probably heard a lot about big data. There’s no doubt that you need analytics and insights to run a business. But what is the difference between big data, analytics, and insights?

Big data, analytics, and insights are all subsets of data mining. Data mining is the process of examining data sets to identify patterns, trends, or other helpful information. Data mining can be done on any data set, including structured data, unstructured data, text, audio, video, and images. The goal of data mining is to extract knowledge from data sets.

What Is Big Data? 

Big data is a term used to describe the exponential growth of data. It also describes the explosion of data generated by an ever-increasing number of sources, including social media, sensors, cameras, and mobile devices. Big data is often used for predictive analytics or to make decisions. 

An example of big data is too big for traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) to handle. RDBMS are structured database systems that require schemas.

What Is Analytics?

Analytics is the process of collecting and analysing data to understand and predict consumer behaviour. It can be used for various purposes, from understanding how a website is being used to expecting what items customers will buy.

It is the study of data and its quantitative analysis. Companies can use analytics to measure and analyse data about their products and services. Analytics can be used to optimise and improve business processes and increase profits.

What Is Insights?

Insights is a set of tools that helps you manage your data. You can segment your data to see how different people use your product or service. You can also see how different product versions are used and what features are used the most.

Insight is a tool that can be used to analyse and visualize data. It is a type of analysis used to collect data and find patterns, trends, and correlations.

How Do Big Data, Analytics, and Insights Work Together?

Big data, analytics, and insights work together to give insight into what is happening globally. They are all tools that help people to understand the world around them.

Big data, analytics, and insights are three crucial pillars of the business intelligence ecosystem. Big data is the raw material that feeds analytics and insights. Analytics is the process of turning raw data into actionable information. Insights are the results of analytics that are then translated into actionable knowledge.

Organizations are providing more technology to their customers to increase the possibility of getting more customers. This leads to more data being generated, and therefore, this data can be used to analyse the consumers’ needs and preferences. The collected information and data are the insights of the consumers.

Big data, analytics, and insights are critical to a business. They all work together to make marketing more accurate, personalised, and effective.