How to put your untapped data to work to transform your business

Ensure business continuity, protect your organization from security risk, and improve your customers’ and employees’ experiences all by putting your data to work in real-time. You already have the data — why not make it chip in for rent? A recent study found that 80% of companies surveyed saw an increase in revenue due to real-time data analytics. 

The reason you can solve these all-encompassing, complex business problems with data? It’s because so many of your business problems are really just data problems in disguise. Let’s dive into a few of those problems and how you can solve them.

3 business problems are actually data problems

Data problem #1: Your enterprise applications and infrastructure must be optimized for availability and performance. Imagine you’re the IT leader of a streaming service, and the season finale of the most popular, talked-about show on your platform just dropped. And then the service went down. Twitter is outraged. Your teams are calling. Everyone is frantic. You can see fans actively leaving, even canceling their subscriptions in frustration (over 60% of outages cost at least US$100,000, and 15% cost over US$1 million). 

If we rewind this situation and look at the data leading up to that unplanned downtime, there were signs that pointed to systems reaching capacity and that things were about to go south. If your streaming service was always observing what all the data was saying in real time, it could have prevented this cinematic catastrophe. 

Data problem #2: With the increase in cyberthreats where bot attacks alone doubled throughout 2023, organizations need to do everything in their power to identify threats and act quickly to stop them in their tracks. I’m sure a company you’ve interacted with has been a victim of a cyber attack in the past six months. Their data indicated that an attack was unfolding. If those companies were able to get real-time insights from that data, it’s possible that the threats could have been stopped or at least made the damage less severe. 

Data problem #3: Customer expectations are constantly increasing, and with that is the necessity to anticipate their needs and personalize their experiences. When it comes to ecommerce customers, 69% of online shoppers go straight to the search bar when visiting ecommerce sites, but 80% leave the site due to poor experiences.

Employee expectations are also increasing; they want to find the information they’re looking for easily in order to solve issues quickly and devote attention to more complicated projects. If employees can’t find the information, files, or data they need, it can lead to lost productivity, decreased accuracy, decreased morale, and lost credibility for the company if employees aren’t able to help their customers. This is a data problem.

So, how do I put my data to work and solve these data problems?

With all of these problems proving themselves to be data problems… how can you solve them in one fell swoop? You can use a unified, search-powered platform to:

1. Capture all of your data. From every environment and from every source, whether machine-generated or user-generated, you need to capture all of your diverse data. It needs to be brought together in one place quickly and at scale. You never know if a log is hiding some nefarious login attempts, or maybe it’s just someone who cannot for the life of them remember their password — you don’t know until you capture all of your data and…

2. Make your data searchable and analyzable. Put that data to work by searching and analyzing it. You don’t know what data is useful and pertinent to what you’re trying to figure out until you, well, do know. By making your data searchable and analyzable, you can search for what you’re looking for, whether it's an indicator of compromise, a corrupted file, or a user not being able to log in (like that person in the last example). And finally…

3. Make your data explorable. Make the results of your search explorable and visual to put your data in a format that makes it useful when you want to use it to make decisions and act quickly. When you’re drawing from over 400 data sources and using over 300 applications to manage it all, you have to find what’s pertinent information in real time. This impacts the time it takes to gain insights from all that data and ultimately, the time it takes to act on it. 

Why should you take all these steps on one unified, search-powered platform? Imagine one of your security analysts has siloed data sources that are only accessible through different tools. They would have to go through each tool and tie the context together manually. That wastes their time and yours — leaving you vulnerable to security risks. 

By exploring your data seamlessly within one unified platform, you can iteratively refine your searches and apply relevance to your data insights in real time. This enables you to address broader business challenges, opportunities, and priorities — like improving customer experience, increasing resiliency, and reducing security risks — all by using a resource you already have: your data.

Find out more and get the ultimate guide to making use of your data.

Originally published January 3, 2023; updated June 24, 2024.