Enterprises of all sizes are facing challenges on a range of data performance management issues from stopping bad data to keeping their data flows operating effectively.

This is a finding of a survey by data performance management specialist StreamSets which finds that nearly 90 percent of respondents reported flowing bad data into their data stores, while only 12 percent think themselves good at the key aspects of data flow performance management.

Continue reading →

If you were thinking about switching careers in order to start earning bigger money, you might want to consider a career in big data management. Reports started coming in that salaries for this position jumped eight percent this year, more than what the Bank of England forecast (three percent).

Professional IT resourcing firm Experis also says that 5,148 advertised jobs in Q1 were in the big data segment, with 87 percent being in London. Other tech cities are closing the gap though, with Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham being notable examples.

Continue reading →

For as long as I’ve been involved with the field, the hard-headed school of "we need a cost benefit analysis" or "build me an ROI justification" has defined the business-benefit of BI as mainly its ability to "speed up and improve decision making".

With the rise of self-service BI, the first part of that aspiration has been successfully satisfied. People are getting decision-relevant data quickly. However, the second outcome -- improved decision making -- is a less certain result (and also much harder to model in an ROI calculation than is agility).

Continue reading →

This Sunday is Father's Day in some countries, such as the USA. This is not just a day to celebrate biological fathers, but anybody that filled that role. As the family dynamic changes, there are households with two fathers. Heck, in some single-parent families, a woman serves as both a mom and dad, meaning she too should be celebrated. In other words, there is no wrong way to celebrate -- if you feel that a person deserves your praise and recognition, then they do!

Today, in anticipation of the holiday, Twitter shares some interesting tweet information regarding dads. One of the biggest values of the social network is text mining, and the company is giving us a glimpse into its dad data -- dada?

Continue reading →

Data growth presents a number of problems for enterprises. Aside from the obvious ones like the need for extra storage, there's the risk that employees often unwittingly store sensitive data in unsafe locations within local and network storage, professional email accounts and the cloud.

Security software company Ground Labs is launching a new data discovery solution that scans for 100 different data points and personally identifiable information (PII), so organizations can protect critical information at every endpoint without relying on traditional perimeter security methods.

Continue reading →

Many businesses are keen to exploit the advantages of big data, but they struggle to find the resources needed to do so.

A new partnership between management consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and analytics specialist Mu Sigma aims to let clients exploit cutting-edge big data and analytics solutions to transform the way they do business.

Continue reading →

The growth of the Internet of Things, increased reliance on analytics to support decision making, and greater use of video means businesses are storing more and more data. That data has become a crucial asset and storing it so that it's accessible and safe is a major challenge. Solutions from major vendors are costly but data storage operating system specialist RAIDIX has come up with a product that can offer fault tolerance on commodity hardware.

We spoke to Sergey Platonov, product owner at RAIDIX to find out more about the solution and why data storage is now a major challenge.

Continue reading →

As organizations rely more and more on data, so keeping it secure and making sure it can only be accessed by the appropriate people becomes increasingly important.

To address this, identity and access management company SailPoint is launching an updated version of its SecurityIQ solution that provides an integrated and comprehensive approach to governing all data in the enterprise.

Continue reading →

Businesses are under increasing pressure to replace legacy storage with cloud and hybrid options in order to modernize their infrastructure and cut costs.

Migrating data presents a number of challenges and IT teams are turning to automation in order to address them. We spoke to Jonathan Huberman, CEO of specialist in the hybrid enterprise file sync and share market, Syncplicity, to find out more about how enterprises can move their data smoothly and make it available across a number of devices.

Continue reading →

A new survey of IT security professionals working in the financial services sector reveals that 90 percent feel vulnerable to security breaches and 44 percent have actually experienced one -- 19 percent in the last year.

These findings come from enterprise data protection specialist Vormetric which, in conjunction with 451 Research, has issued a financial services edition of its 2016 Data Threat Report.

Continue reading →

A new report from data quality management company Blazent and 451 Research shows a disconnect between businesses' desire to pursue machine learning analytics and the quality of their data.

The poll, of 200 C-level and senior IT leaders, reveals that despite the 67 percent of respondents that have a strong appetite for advanced analytics technologies, 60 percent have low confidence in their organization's data quality management practices.

Continue reading →

When it comes to sports teams, marketing is everything. You have to sell tickets, merchandise and get the deals for TV coverage, though the latter is usually covered by a deal with the league. Now the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers is teaming up with Microsoft in an effort to obtain the data it needs to increase its revenue.

To accomplish that goal the team is turning big data and the power of the Cortana Intelligence Suite, Microsoft's digital assistant.

Continue reading →

Healthcare costs for people diagnosed with mental illness and common chronic health conditions are 75 percent higher than for those without a mental health diagnosis according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

This is because there’s often a lack of coordination between multiple care providers, different state policies and diverse payment structures which can result in poor health outcomes and higher costs across health systems.

Continue reading →

Data, in whatever format it may take, is a vital part of every business. With phones tracking our every move, all aspects of customer interaction recorded, and new cars generating around of 350MB of data per second, there’s a lot of data to look at.

Billions of gigabytes of data are generated across the world every day; so much that it’s almost impossible to quantify. This data poses both a potential problem and a possible reward. With so much information in front of businesses, the vast majority is lost, disappearing into the dark and creating a possible security threat.  But if it’s found and used effectively, it could actually be very profitable.

Continue reading →

Microsoft is both an open source and Linux champion nowadays -- on the surface at least (pun intended). In other words, while it does embrace those things, we may not know the motivation of the Windows-maker regarding them. Regardless, Linux and open source are now important to the Redmond company.

Today, Microsoft announces a CentOS-based VM image for Azure called 'Linux Data Science Virtual Machine'. The VM has pre-installed tools such as Anaconda Python Distribution, Computational Network Toolkit, and Microsoft R Open. It focuses on machine learning and analytics, making it a great choice for data scientists.

Continue reading →