3 Little-known advantages of real-time data streams

In the past, data streaming has been mostly reserved for specific businesses that required live data to operate, such as financial institutions and traders who streamed live stock market data in order to make instantaneous decisions.

Today, data streaming has transformed into a key component used by all types of businesses that have an online presence. Understanding how your prospects and customers interact with your company online and accessing detailed business analytics is absolutely essential towards maintaining a profitable, competitive, relevant, and long-lasting online presence.

What is data streaming?

In short, data streaming is receiving an uninterrupted flow of data in real-time.

For an eCommerce web store, for example, the business can receive a data stream that shows how many visitors are on each page at that exact moment in time, and send events when a customer makes a purchase or clicks a button to opt-in to their marketing campaigns.

Whenever a stream of data is sent in real-time, no matter the data source, it is considered a data stream. Your business can then use this data stream to make decisions, extract important information, and process that data into useful business insights.

The advantages of real-time data streams

In today’s digital age, everything revolves around data. For large technology companies, the mantra is often to collect as much data as quickly as possible, about as many activities as possible.

It’s no secret these companies are able to use this data to their advantage and make predictions and informed decisions that would have otherwise been impossible.

Your business can take advantage of real-time data streams in a similar manner, and use this data to make real-time business decisions that can potentially skyrocket your company’s revenue and profitability.

Here are a few advantages of real-time data streams, and how they can impact your business in a positive way.

1. Continuous and instantaneous business insights

Receiving continuous and instantaneous data from your business allows you to make quick, informed decisions on the fly. When you’re dealing with dynamic data streams with large numbers of variables and information, you can process this data and form useful insights that can be used to make critical business decisions.

This lets you keep a pulse on your company, understand how your business is operating at any particular moment in time, and use these insights to grow your business further.

2. Save storage space

When trying to extract insights and useful information from a set of data, the “nominal solution” has always been to aggregate static data, store it on a large server or in a warehouse, and then perform batch processing operations on that data to extract the information you need.

While this method does work, it should be apparent how tedious and time-consuming batch processing large amounts of static data can be.

This is where real-time data processing saves the day, allowing your business to receive real-time insights on the fly without having to go back and process stored data.

This lets your company save on storage space and consume fewer resources overall, reducing your expenses and helping you invest back into your company.

3. Respond to risks and events quickly

Flagging risks and threats in your company always required manual intervention and oversight from a security or information technology team, but does it have to be this way?

With real-time data streaming, your business can quickly identify threats and flag risks before they become a problem, ultimately saving you time and money in the long run.

Use Lytics to incorporate real-time data streams into your business

Ready to implement real-time data streaming into your business and make actionable use of your business data? We developed Lytics Cloud Connect to give brands the ability to stream specific data segments from their data warehouse into any downstream tools they choose.