- Lack of knowledgeable professionals
Being a modern technology, running big data and large data tools requires highly skilled personnel. This is where big data professionals come in handy. The professionals needed to run big data initiatives include data scientists, data engineers, and data analysts. These individuals are responsible for operating different tools needed to ensure data makes sense and supports decision-making in an organization. The lack of these professionals means that data cannot be used appropriately, and this scarcity is often caused by the fast evolution of big data tools.
To bridge this gap, companies must invest an additional amount in recruiting relevant professionals. They should also offer training programs to equip the existing professionals within the organization. They can also purchase knowledge analytics solutions powered by artificial intelligence/machine learning.
- Lack of understanding of big data
Some companies fail to understand the big data initiatives. This is due to insufficient understanding. Staff might not understand what data is, how it can be stored, its processing approaches, its importance and different data sources. While data professionals might know what is happening, others may struggle to understand the bigger picture. If employees fail to understand the importance of data storage, they may not keep the sensitive data and the backups. This makes it hard to retrieve data when needed.
This challenge can be solved by holding or attending big data workshop seminars to enable employees to learn. Training programs need to be offered for all workers handling data regularly or those involved in large data projects. All levels of the organization must ensure a culture of understanding big data.
- Data growth challenges
Vast amounts of data coming from different places are one of the top challenges of storing and retrieving data. Such data comes in different formats, which can be structured or unstructured. With the growth of such diverse data from various sources, it becomes increasingly challenging for organizations to store, retrieve and process them to offer the needed insight. This data comes in the form of videos, audio, text and other formats.
This can be solved by choosing modern techniques to handle these vast amounts of data through compression and get rid of duplication. Companies can also deploy big data tools like Hadoop, NoSQL and others.
- Data security
Security data is becoming one of the biggest problems that organizations are forced to endure. As a new goldmine, data is often a target for hackers and malicious persons who want to access sensitive data. Sadly, most companies focus on understanding, storing and analyzing datasets and fail to focus on securing them.
To sort out this problem, companies must recruit cybersecurity professionals to guard data. Furthermore, they should invest in encryption, data segregation and access control.
- Tool selection challenges
There are dozens of available tools that can be used to manage data. Although they might serve the same purpose, these tools vary in capabilities. These challenges companies as they seek to find the best tool that serves their purposes. Tools such as HBase, Hadoop, MapReduce and Cassandra often cause confusion to organizations that want to identify the right one to store data and analytics.
As a leader in an organization, you need to hire experienced professionals who can recommend the right tools for your business. The consultant will offer recommendations on the simplest and practical tools depending on your case or company’s scenario.
