Organizations need big data analysis to gain a comprehensive and continuous understanding of their data. Many of these successful organizations utilize business intelligence platforms or solutions to help them gather, understand and visualize this data. This subsequently makes up the backbone of their intelligence strategy.
What is a Business Intelligence Platform?
A Business Intelligence Platform is a technological solution that helps businesses and enterprises to collect, understand, and interpolate their data. This is done not only to make better and more informed decisions but also to turn their data into a competitive advantage. This effectively provides businesses with endless opportunities to grow, add value, and outperform their competition or threats.
The data can be sourced from multiple entry points such as databases, emails, survey responses, and internet activity, to build insights that can improve an organization's intelligence strategy.
Why is Business Intelligence Important?
Businesses today are generating more data about their customers and operations than ever before. In fact, the World Economic Forum estimates that by 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be generated every day globally. This Big data presents businesses with various opportunities for success. It provides companies with incredible value when analyzed and utilized correctly.
Unfortunately, more often than not, companies are not doing this well. The sheer amount of data collected has created a significant challenge for many organizations. The main problem is that they are only using a small percentage of this data to make informed decisions, or in the worst case scenario, not using any at all. In many of these events, organizations are not so sure what to do with their data.
Ultimately, this can actually cost an organization. Unused or misused data costs a business in the form of lost opportunities, lower efficiency and productivity, quality concerns, increased threat attacks, and more. It can become even more costly when a malicious threat actor has breached the data due to poor intelligence on the organization's behalf. Therefore, business intelligence that is rooted in accurately analyzed and visualized data provides immense value.
The advantages of implementing Business Intelligence Solutions
Here are some other advantages of implementing an enterprise business intelligence platform in your organization:
- Improve visibility. Business Intelligence Business Intelligence Platform help companies have better control and visibility of their data. It collects and interprets data that would otherwise be missed due to the sheer volume of data available for organizations, illuminating all areas and aspects of your organization for improvement and insights.
- Real-time, accurate insights. BI Platform can quickly pull a large amount of Big data together and analyze it in real-time. This enables leaders to make accurate and reliable decisions based on groundbreaking information they are receiving without the red tape and time it takes to manually pull reports together. Companies then have the advantage of being adaptable and abreast of the latest developments.
- Actionable information. An effective BI Platform doesn't just collect and analyze big data; it provides business leaders with insights into the trends and patterns of data that allow companies to make decisions based on the information provided and act accordingly.
- Efficiency improvements. Enterprise business intelligence platforms support efficient operations by acting on business intelligence that accurately reflects a company. As the insights from the data can be widely shared and easily visualized, teams can eliminate redundancies quickly, and employees can shift their focus to more meaningful work instead of manually processing data.
Through all the above, Business Intelligence Platforms provide organizations with an unmatched competitive advantage. It helps companies understand and manage the vast quantities of data they accumulate. Most importantly, it works off your company's data, making it invaluable as no competitor can replicate it.
How does a BI Platform work? Common features and purposes
A Business Intelligence Platform aims to develop a data-driven culture that involves the workforce using data analytics, statistics, and insights to optimize their processes and operations. They enable organizations to accomplish tasks better and increase the bottom line. Here is how it works.
Gather data
On average, companies use over 400 data sources to feed their Business Intelligence Platform and analytics. This raw data is collected from business activity, such as emails, spreadsheets, machinery, databases, etc. When looking for the right BI Platform for your company, you should ensure that your system enables integration from many data sources and multiple databases. This is essential to get the best data quality as it directly determines the power of its prediction. It also helps speed up the process of filtering out poor-quality data. You should ensure security measures and compliance with data regulations.
Understand the data
Once all the data is collected, filtered, and cleaned, the next step is to understand the data. The Big Data platforms help here by giving individuals the ability to see and query the data — all accessible from one platform for ease. The data is also organized and modeled, making it incredibly quick to query and find data on all levels.
Visualise data
Taking it one step further, a BI Platform also helps to turn from understanding the data to making it usable. It provides insights for teams to identify and act on at every level. Hence, employees from all over an organization can access the data they need to make strategic decisions accurately and quickly — even without highly technical backgrounds. It increases collaboration, efficiency, and work quality.
The Future of Business Intelligence Platforms
The growth of business intelligence has made it possible for organizations to gain more accurate and detailed insights into all business activities. In part, thanks to technological development, the possibilities, and advancements of BI Platforms continue to improve. Here are a few examples:
- Cloud-based BI Platform. Many enterprise business intelligence platforms are now cloud-based. This development makes it much easier to install and use for organizations of any size. Security and accessibility were also significantly improved as everything is hosted on a virtual network. Companies no longer need to buy a server, invest heavily in dedicated personnel, or waste time managing BI. Lowering the barrier and raising opportunities for many companies to implement.
- Self-service Business Intelligence Solutions. As many companies started implementing BI Solutions by themselves, it evolved to become more of a self-service system. Prior to this, BI required teams with the technical and strategic skills to collate, interpolate and understand the data. Now, employees can easily get useful insights and filter through data collected in BI systems by themselves.
- Augmented analytics. With the growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), it’s no surprise that BI Platforms are also exploring this realm of developing technologies. It’s bringing new opportunities for companies to have data prepared and analyzed by AI, helping drive decision-making automatically. In the end, this has the potential to open the door for smarter and more agile business intelligence.
Business Intelligence with Sangfor
When done right, business intelligence is a powerful driver for success. It is now easier than ever for organizations of every size to start investing in a Big Data Analysis and gain a competitive advantage. Coupled with developing innovations in this space, BI helps to create simple, intuitive, and impactful visualizations of large volumes of data. Supporting organizations to become safer, more efficient, and streamlined. Data Warehouse is a similar but different tool than Business Intelligence Platform. It's large collection of business data that is used to store, process, and help organizations to make business decisions. Read more about Data Warehouses here.
Business Intelligence & Analytics Solutions (BI) is the newest major innovation within Sangfor IAG. It is based on IAG's massive internet log and is the ideal network management solution for Small & Medium enterprises. Watch the introduction video to learn more.
Frequently Asked Questions
There are several examples of how businesses can use a business intelligence solution. One example is it can help you discover and analyze specific types of risky behavior. It does this by generating reports about network traffic, logging all users' unauthorized internet access, and analyzing bandwidth step-by-step to find the root cause of network issues. Based on this information and data, companies can better protect their assets and information. They are also able to be more proactive in their defense strategy.
No. They are more advanced and cloud-based, the implementation doesn’t require a complete upheaval of existing IT systems. In fact, systems can work simultaneously in many cases. Sometimes, additional systems may be necessary to connect existing infrastructure with the BI Platform.
Yes. In most cases, BI solutions can easily integrate data using APIs from various data collections points. So it is an ideal solution for the existing infrastructure. Think of a BI Platform as the missing puzzle that connects all your infrastructure and information.
