President and CEO at Volt Active Data, Inc.
getty
In our real-time age, streaming has been wildly successful at transforming how data moves around the enterprise. But moving data—even at scale—is only one piece of the puzzle.
Businesses now demand more value from their data, and they expect to unlock that value in less time. When organizations are able to rapidly analyze data and act on it, they can increase revenue, prevent revenue leakage and otherwise control operational expenditures.
Move over, big data: Streaming intelligence is the next business frontier for data, and 2023 is shaping up to be the year companies finally figure out how to monetize their streaming data.
First off, let’s define our terms.
What Is Streaming Data?
Streaming data is data that is continuously generated and immediately moved from the originating data source to another location (e.g., an application). Examples of streaming data include real-time stock quotes, multiplayer game interactions, log files generated by user behavior, data generated by IoT devices and customer transaction data.
Just like water flows, data streams are constantly moving. Once data is generated from the source, it instantly moves to a data platform where, with the right tools and technology in place, it can be acted on in real time with no downloading or batching required. Instead of dealing with minutes or even hours of latency, organizations can act in seconds or even milliseconds to drive powerful, game-changing decisions that grow their user base, increase revenue, prevent revenue leakage and build customer loyalty.
We live in a world where milliseconds matter, and data streams enable enterprises to process data in near-real time, which allows them to make data-driven decisions rapidly.
On the flip side, when organizations lack stream processing technology, they’re unable to act on data until it’s at least somewhat stale in a best-case scenario.
Today, all enterprises face the challenge of economic uncertainty. To weather this ongoing storm of uncertainty, they need to take proactive steps to optimize profitability as much as they can. Since streaming data gives organizations the ability to increase revenue and prevent revenue leakage, I believe data streams will be the major focus of 2023 and beyond.
How To Use Streaming Data For Revenue
Increasingly, B2B organizations understand that they’re sitting on a wealth of data that can be useful for their applications and customers. To make the most of the opportunity, more and more enterprises are embracing data monetization—or the process of converting data into revenue. In fact, while the global market for data monetization brought in $2.1 billion in 2020, it’s expected to balloon to $15.4 billion by 2030, growing 22.1% each year in the interim.
When it boils down to it, there’s no shortage of ways to monetize streaming data. Telco companies can use data streams to target specific customers more effectively, enabling them to upsell at the most ideal opportunities. Similarly, e-commerce companies can examine browsing history in real time and recommend products that each individual user is likely to buy based on what other customers who’ve followed a similar path have done.
Further, ride-hailing companies might sell streaming location data to third parties, which then use that information to offer discounts to users in the nearby vicinity. Data streams can also be monetized by leveraging them to improve product offerings based on user behavior or serve up in-app purchase notifications at the perfect times. This list goes on and on.
How To Use Streaming Data To Prevent Revenue Leakage
In addition to using streaming data to increase revenue, enterprises can also use it to prevent revenue leakage—an issue that impacts 42% of organizations, according to MGI Research.
With data breaches now setting U.S.-based businesses back an average of $9.44 million per breach, fraudsters have their sights set on massive paydays. With larger attack surfaces to target and more potential entry points to monitor, enterprises have their work cut out for them when it comes to securing their systems and protecting their data.
By acting on streaming data for fraud prevention and detection, enterprises can protect themselves against increasingly expensive attacks. Rather than waiting for an intrusion to occur and then responding when it’s already too late, organizations can take a proactive, real-time fraud prevention approach that’s fueled by streaming data and machine learning.
With the right tools in place, it’s possible to analyze millions of events each second to easily identify suspicious behaviors and prevent things like credit card fraud, ad bot fraud, network intrusions originating from IoT devices and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. With complex rules and algorithms analyzing fraud identification patterns in real time, enterprises can rapidly detect any anomalies and block bad actors before they wreak havoc.
The Key To Monetizing Streaming Data: Intelligent Decisioning
Unlocking the true promise of streaming data and maximizing your enterprise’s streaming intelligence is only possible with the right technologies in place. To truly move at the speed of real time, organizations need to be able to add decisioning into the data streams themselves.
It’s hard to mention streaming data without also mentioning Apache Kafka, an open-source event store and stream processing solution now used by more than 80% of Fortune 100 companies.
But Kafka is just a broker in the world of streaming data, routing data from one place to another. Companies still need to be able to make quick, intelligent decisions based on the data Kafka streams. To do that, they need to properly vet their data platform capabilities:
• Can the platform act in real time on high volumes of data?
• Does it have geo-redundancy so that it can stay up even during peak times or during data center maintenance?
• Can it aggregate data at the edge so that only the most important and relevant data is acted on and stored?
All of the above will enable you to use streaming data to its full potential and for game-changing business decisions that improve your bottom line.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
