THE networking and security industries are fast evolving, with Big Data and analytics seen as among the most significant developments to look out for further this year.
Fortinet Vice President for Southeast Asia and Hong Kong George Chang told the BusinessMirror that both can be applied for different reasons. “The biggest need is business intelligence but it’s also very important for security,” he said.
Big Data is defined as the “term for a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database-management tools or traditional data-processing applications.”
Dubbed as “the new oil” by the World Economic Forum, it can improve decision-making, reduce time to market and increase profits, as well as raise significant risk ranging from disastrous data breaches to privacy and compliance concerns.
While the amount of data being gathered is staggering, segmenting the data, can lead to more actionable results, he said.
Hence, analytics, as a multidimensional discipline, comes into place to interpret raw data, he said.
In this process, he noted, the insights produced are used to recommend action or to guide decision-making rooted in the business context. While most of the nations globally and across the Asia-Pacific region have already embraced trends on the so-called Big Data, the Philippines is on a start-up phase as far as its adoption is concerned.
It is evident in the telco space, especially in regional coverage analysis and relationship mapping, as well as in financial services, health care and retail sectors.
Analyzing Big Data is seen helpful to the manufacturing, supply chain and consumer industries, and even the government.
Globally, the market for analytics is now projected to be around $232 billion by 2015, more than the estimate of $160 billion two years ago.
With 4.4 million high-value jobs expected to be created worldwide this year, only 30 percent of this totality would be fulfilled.
Although the Philippines is considered a “starter” in its adoption, it still has a competitive edge in this field. In fact, this island-nation is the first in the world to declare analytics as the next growth focus.
Given this, initiatives from both the public and private sectors are now in effect to help encourage more talents to go into careers related to this emerging trend, including data analysts, programmers, mathematicians and other technically educated individuals.
