According to new research, 62 percent of eCommerce organizations say that real-time data collection will be at the forefront of their priorities for 2023.

The study, carried out for Oxylabs by Censuswide, surveyed over 1,000 senior data decision-makers, split between UK and US eCommerce companies. It finds that as companies begin to rely more on efficient and low-cost data collection methods such as external data gathering, used by 40.54 percent of respondents, there is a clear shift towards gaining more actionable insights.

Thanks to eCommerce, IoT devices, social media and more, organizations are collecting larger volumes of data than ever before. But often this is on the basis that they collect everything and work out what to do with it later. An approach that opens them up to risk that data can be misused.

We spoke to open detection and response firm Corelight's CISO Bernard Brantley, who believes organizations can implement a complete data strategy, allowing them to work backward from risk to raw logs and create a supply chain that generates information critical to risk reduction activities.

It has undoubtedly been a turbulent few years for the UK manufacturing industry. On top of the supply chain headaches caused by Brexit and the pandemic, spiraling energy prices have presented new financial challenges in recent months. All of this comes as larger, darker clouds loom overhead, with recent S&P Global/CIPS UK Manufacturing PMI data showing that the UK manufacturing industry is on the brink of a recession.

To succeed, or even just keep afloat, in this environment, it is now more important than ever for manufacturers to innovate and drive greater operational efficiency. So, what are some of the actions manufacturers need to take to be successful in 2023?

It’s no exaggeration to say that data drives business today. Organizations are literally flooded with data on all fronts, particularly as they accelerate their digital transformation and cloud migration. As data proliferates, it’s increasingly difficult to manage. That’s where metadata comes in. Though metadata is often described as "data about data," it’s actually much more than that.

Metadata is generated whenever data is ingested, accessed by users, moved around an organization, integrated or augmented with data from other sources, profiled or cleaned and analyzed. All this information creates the context for other data elements, providing a complete picture of the data. This holistic view makes it possible to organize and locate data, to understand what it means and to maximize its value.

Data is increasingly seen as being among and organization’s most valuable assets and businesses are generating more and more of it.

But of course it has to be stored and kept secure. Much of it is in an unstructured form too, which creates additional challenges. We asked some experts in the data and storage field to give us some predictions for this sector in the coming year.

Since the explosion of technology in the last few decades, data has been increasingly positioned as a silver bullet that can fix all the trials and tribulations of the modern world. For those giant tech companies who amassed mass amounts of (mostly) third-party data, data was the new oil -- sold in barrels to any company wanting to find and scale an audience. But KPIs on data effectiveness became increasingly viable, businesses began to question the amount of data they’d bought.  

Parallel to this, governments and consumer rights groups became aware of the increasing volume of unwanted noise being thrown at potential clients and customers. Businesses, both B2B and B2C, became liable for data missteps -- case in point with Meta being fined 17m euro for what amounted to bad data housekeeping.

More than half (54 percent) of respondents to a new survey say securing data with appropriate access rights is one of their biggest hurdles. While almost 60 percent believe their organizations should be placing extra emphasis on data security.

The third annual State of Data Engineering Survey from Immuta also finds that that 89 percent of organizations report missing business opportunities because of data access bottlenecks.

We hear a lot of talk these days about the virtues of data-driven organizations. That’s certainly reasonable up to a point -- but what does it really mean? When it comes to routine operational decisions, in particular, the current bias seems to favor increased automation over human judgment. The data doesn’t lie -- or so the story goes -- so we’re better off deferring to programmatic decision models.

That may be reasonable for some situations, but when you’re operating in a complex and nuanced domain, take casualty insurance claims for example, that highly automated decision paradigm can begin to fall apart very quickly. Thousands of different variables come into play. Medical records and accident reports contain subtle details that provide vital clues about potential risks. To complicate matters further, important minutiae are often buried deep inside the narrative content.

Data centers around the world are currently home to an estimated 1,327 exabytes of data. This information has a potentially huge value so it needs protecting.

But as more businesses choose to trust their information to external data centers how can they be sure that it's going to be properly secured? We spoke to Oliver Pinson-Roxburgh, CEO of Defense.com, to find out how organizations can choose the most secure data center possible?

Data collection practices receive increasingly more attention and sophistication. Web scraping, and automated acquisition processes in general, changed the nature of data collection so much that old challenges were solved and new problems emerged.

One of them is the selection of data in regards to dynamicity. Since now we’re able to collect unthinkable volumes of information in mere seconds, getting some particular sample is no longer an issue. Additionally, in business, we will often scour the same sources over and over to monitor competition, brands, and anything else that’s relevant to the industry.

Data is increasingly one of the most valuable resources that businesses have, but extracting that value requires effective management of content.

A new survey from Rocket Software of more than 500 corporate IT professionals across multiple industries in the US, UK and APAC regions shows that business data is still vastly unstructured with 81 percent of respondents indicating that at least some of their data is considered 'dark'.

September this year marked five years since the notorious Equifax data breach which exposed the social security numbers, birthdates, credit card details, and more of millions of customers.

But how much has the industry learned from this breach? And what measures can be used to help avoid similar issues in the future? We spoke to Ian Coe, co-founder at Tonic.ai to find out why fake data might be the answer.

Companies can now gather more information about their customers than ever before. But according to a new study data science is not benefiting marketers, with 84 percent of marketing executives saying their ability to predict customer behavior is guesswork.

The report from predictive analytics company Pecan AI, based on surveys carried out by Wakefield Research, finds four out of five marketing execs report difficulty in making data-driven decisions despite all of the consumer data at their disposal.

Art imitates life, that we all know. But what if art imitates your personal life, your personal likeness and does it so well that the line between what is real and surreal blurs?

Unbeknownst to us, we are becoming models for state-of-the-art AI technology that trains on terabytes of poorly filtered data scraped from all over the web. This data can include our personal photos, medical images, and even copyrighted content -- basically, anything ever posted online.

While nearly everyone knows that data is important, almost no one is able to use it to its full potential. Each and every organization is generating and using data in daily operations but 98 percent of our recent Data Health Barometer survey cohorts in the UK admitted that their organizations are dealing with challenges in using data effectively. Nearly half say it's not easy to use data to drive business impact at all, which is even worse as we head into a period of potential UK-wide economic uncertainty.

The most significant questions for data professionals are whether they have full visibility of all data that is available across their business to help them make reliable decisions according to that data; an understanding of how exactly the data is relevant to the company overall but also to their own individual role in the business; if they know how to use that data to its full potential in an ever-growing competitive business marketplace and have access to the data they need in real-time, wherever it may be.