Love thy data!
If Sashi Tharoor, were to speak of modern-day data, he would probably say "It is preposterous and unfathomable that the exorbitant quantity of data existing in the universe is subserviently being under-utilized and this situation needs to get arrested with immediate urgency."
Honestly, it's not THAT bad, but the world is seriously looking to suck every possible drop of juice from your social data. By social data, we mean the trails of truth we leave behind every time we post on Facebook, upload a picture on Instagram, tweet or more recently, post on Mastodon. What began as an innocent platform to let you voice your feelings has now grown into a big fat economy that tracks every click, intelligently profiles your personality, and foresees what your online buyers' activities are going to be.
Why else would protein supplement ads mysteriously pop up on your social channels just because you checked out a gym membership across the street! Social networks are tying up with businesses to give you a more personalized experience, and in turn, businesses are making money off you. What happens in the backend is highly complex, with multiple layers of security, data management and computation.
Recently, I met Doug Cutting, known as the Big Daddy of data and enterprise computing. Besides creating what is called the Hadoop open-source framework for data management, he is also the Chief Architect at Cloudera, an enterprise data management and cloud solutions company. Doug put it this way: "Social data is the most important data since it is data about you, and it is the type of data that gives you invaluable insights about human behaviour. Hence, it is important that businesses secure this data and leverage it sensibly."
From banks to e-commerce companies, everyone is leveraging human data in their own way. While most modern-day banks allow you to login with your social media credentials and most online shopping websites let you shop on your social channels, they are a worried lot in the backend. The right data needs to reach the right people and data cannot be leaked. On one hand, the data is closely linked to the business, and on the other hand, consumers can lose trust if businesses misuse -- intentionally or unintentionally -- your data. Cloudera has a suite of solutions that lets businesses sync up data from their servers to their cloud partners and have attractive dashboards that let them access and manage your data effectively. With the world moving to cloud computing, the challenge of cybersecurity is huge and it takes players like these to free businesses of the burden of managing data and letting them focus on their business. Of course, the final beneficiary is you and me, whose data is being used sensibly to make our virtual lives wee bit easier. Love live data and let our data be used well!
