Friday, May 2, 2014

How to Store Your Data


Forward-thinking real estate companies have already started gathering and analyzing data. The problem with data is that it is mostly unorganized. And this poses many challenges for the data manager who needs an appropriate strategy to store and analyze data.

If you gather data, you will have huge amounts of both structured and unstructured data. How do you organize this data? This is a question that all data managers ask themselves.

One of the biggest data problems that real estate companies face is the large amounts of unorganized data that pile up. Data scientists are aware of the presence of unorganized data. They simply don't know what to do with it. Consequently, they ignore it. But after some time as the stockpile gets bigger and bigger, they will need to decide what to keep and what to throw away.

In some cases, industry regulations may ask real estate companies to keep data for specific periods of time. For example, builders and realtors will have to keep transaction details.

If you are a real estate company that has gathered a large amount of data, you should have a proper plan to sift through data repositories that need not necessarily have any value. You should also have proper strategies to de-duplicate data. You may have the same data in multiple locations. This is a mere wastage of valuable storage space.

Your instinctive drive is to throw away all old data; while at the same time, there is an inherent fear that you might require that data someday. How do organizations deal with the dilemma? The data may exist in internal legacy systems. It may also come from sources such as social media, web sources and machines. To make this information useful, the company will have to invest in long data capabilities.

You will perhaps have to reorganize your data systems over time. This involves sifting through your data repositories, and implementing standards that maintain accuracy. If your company lacks the expertise or resources to do this, you could consider outsourcing this process to data engineers who use cloud-based systems that unify this data into actionable information that will facilitate corporate analytics. And that makes sense because storing your data in the cloud is more economical than keeping it on your data center storage.

In addition, by moving your archival information to the cloud, you save yourself the trouble of having this information on the site. And when this data is finally required, you can retrieve it.

This strategy almost always works. But you may still have difficulty finding out which data you should keep and which data you should throw away. If you decide to keep all data, you will have to buy more storage space and pay more for it.

Data poses many challenges. Besides collecting it and analyzing it, you need to store it appropriately so that you can retrieve it when you need it. If you don't have an onsite system to store data, cloud-based solutions are your best bet. Besides storing your data, they analyze it and turn it into actionable insights.

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