BDaaS: Taking the pain out of big data deployment
By Janet Jaiswal

There’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), even Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). Now, in the quest to make big data initiatives more accessible to mainstream customers, there’s a new As-A-Service offering that offloads the heavy lifting and capital expenditures associated with Big Data analytics.
Organizations from global retail giants to specialty manufacturers are mixing sales data, online data, Internet of Things (IoT) data, customer data, and other miscellaneous unstructured information bits and employing analytics to churn through the deluge to uncover patterns and valuable insights that can drive innovation, unleash new business models, promote increased efficiency, and reduce costs. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, nearly 60 percent of executives surveyed said their firms were generating revenue from big data initiatives.
The rise of Big Data as a Service
But while Fortune 500 players have been investing millions in big data technologies and hard-to-find technology experts and data scientists, small- and mid-sized companies have mostly been shut out due to the significant cost and complexity of deploying and staffing their own initiatives. That’s where Big Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) comes into play. With BDaaS, companies essentially offload all or many of the key ingredients — scalable cloud infrastructure, virtualization capabilities, analytics engines, data management services — to a third-party provider, allowing the enterprise to focus on wringing business value from big data instead of being bogged down in the weeds of technology deployment. It also enables companies to avoid making costly capital expenditures on infrastructure to run big data initiatives, instead allowing them to pay by the second or by the query for just the services and capacity they use. HTF Market Intelligence expects the BDaaS market to reach $48.9 billion by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of 15 percent from 2018 levels.
There are trade-offs, but the BDaaS advantage can benefit companies of all sizes. While off-the-shelf hardware and open source software like Hadoop is readily available, it still requires expertise and lots of investment to spin up essential components and infrastructure to support a big data initiative, unlike BDaaS which doesn’t require a significant commitment to infrastructure or manpower to run deployments. BDaaS providers also take care of compliance and security, and the services are highly scalable so they can easily accommodate the need for more storage or processing power as the volume and velocity of data collection increases.
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