Solutions and Tools for Managing Unstructured Data
In this Data-driven business world, Data is like gold whether it is in Structured form or Unstructured form. Structured data is information that has a set format and is simple to obtain and comprehend. Unstructured Data is the type of data that does not fit into a predefined or traditional format. Unstructured data includes everything from emails, social media posts, and customer feedback to images, videos, and audio recordings generated by individuals/customers. Almost 80% of businesses believe that between 50% and 90% of their data is unstructured, however, this does not indicate that the data is useless. Unstructured data contains valuable insights that can help organizations make better decisions, improve customer satisfaction, drive innovation, and gain a competitive advantage.
Let’s understand it by taking an example - Social media help organizations to understand the trends, customers' reviews, and their emotions with a brand, and their satisfaction level while analyzing sensor data can help brands to optimize their business strategies.
If you want to make your unstructured data ready to use, Data Management is the only choice. Managing Unstructured Data is not an easy task because it generates a large volume of data that is difficult to store, manage, and analyze. Security measures are also required to protect the confidential information of individuals. Unstructured data can be of varying quality and may contain errors or inconsistencies. For example, text data may contain spelling errors or typos, while images may be of varying quality or resolution.
Managing unstructured data can be a challenging task, but there are solutions and tools available to help:
Data Extraction can be Aided by Data Mining Tools: Data Mining tools are successful to extract valuable information from Unstructured data and you can use that information later on. These tools are useful to analyze customer feedback, social media posts, and emails to identify patterns and trends. On the basis of customer buying behavior, patterns, and trends, these tools can help you to predict future demands/outcomes. Unstructured data analysis can assist you in focusing on the areas that require improvement and helping to make the appropriate judgments.
Data Storage in the Cloud: Large amounts of unstructured data can be managed by enterprises using a scalable and affordable option called cloud storage. To store and manage unstructured data, there are numerous incredible Cloud storage options available, like Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, and Google Cloud Storage. Yet, due to scale and security concerns, several businesses also favor storing their data on-site. Ultimately, It relies on the needs of businesses.
Data Visualization Tools: Unstructured data can be difficult to work with, but visualization tools can help simplify complex data by presenting it in a more understandable format. A graphical display of data can captivate the viewer and provide a clear image of insights that can aid in more effective decision-making.
Data Lakes: Data Lakes are cost-effective solutions to store, manage and analyze a large amount of Unstructured Data in its original format. Data lakes enable data to be stored and accessed without having to be transformed into a specific structure or format, making it simple to integrate with existing data.
Text Analytics Tools: Unstructured Data comes in different formats such as images, videos, audio, and text. Text analytics tools are aimed at analyzing textual data such as emails, social media posts, and customer feedback. The primary goal of these tools is to extract useful information from text format. Natural language processing (NLP) is used in these tools to extract insights and trends from unstructured data.
There are various incredible tools with their own USP that you can use to manage Unstructured Data:
MonkeyLearn - MonkeyLearn is a Text Analysis platform with Machine Learning to automate business workflows and save hours of manual data processing.
MongoDB - MongoDB is a next-generation database that helps businesses transform their industries by harnessing the power of data.
Apache Spark - Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. This multi-language engine is for executing data engineering, data science, and machine learning on single-node machines or clusters.
Hadoop - Hadoop is an open-source software framework that facilitates the distributed storage of data across clusters of computers.
Amazon S3 - Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.
Managed data is easy to access and use, you can find out the right information at the right time and it leads you to deliver better results. Unstructured Data Management tools help you to monitor your customers’ every move and provide real-time insights. You can track your customer's preferences, understand their needs, and relationships with your brands, and deliver better services to them.
