Saheed O.

Integrating customer data platforms into big data operations: 3 reasons why you need to A new market research report shows that by 2027, the overall big data security market will grow to $64.4 billion. It's not surprising. Some reports estimate 90 percent of all global data ever created was created in just the past few years. That's good news for marketers looking to gain insights into their customers' minds. But it's also a huge can of worms in terms of increased security risks, privacy, and storage issues, especially now when many employees are working from home on potentially unsecured networks. Customers need to know their data is secure. There is increasing paranoia about the use of customer data being collected, especially by big companies, so one of the most endearing things you could do for your customers now is to assure them of the security of their data. Here are a few other reasons why implementing CDP's is a good move for your customer assurance and big data operations. More Devices and More Data Need More Management With the outgrowth of the Internet of Things (IoT), marketing teams now have massive amounts of data to collect about their customers. They can find out where they are, what time they exercise, how much they text, and even how well they sleep. But the flip side of connected devices is that they produce a lot of data your company doesn't need. I know most companies probably have data stored in multiple places, from various sources. This is where a customer data platform can help. A CDP is a growing category and solution set being developed by companies like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Segment and Microsoft among many others, that can serve as a single point of truth for customer information. They allow you to gather information from many different channels, platforms, and devices into one location to create a whole and up-to-date view of your customer. With that unified view, you can quickly determine what data you need and what you don't. After all, every piece of data you collect is a security risk; you need to make the risk justifiable. Security and Transparency Need to be Part of Your Brand Customers aren't stupid. They understand that their data is valuable, and in today's market, they want full transparency about how you may use it. They don't want to provide it for no reason, and they certainly don't want to offer it up to companies who won't take care of it. As the big data market — and big data security — continue to grow, it's on marketers to understand how privacy and security play into their over customer experience and brand. And I don't just mean posting a note on the home-page warning customers you're capturing their data. I mean taking a proactive approach to being transparent about data use at every point of the customer journey, and making the customers' sharing of data "worth it" at every stage. That also means explaining who you are selling data to. Customers know that if they're getting a service for free, it's in exchange for data. So what are you doing with that data? Who has access to it? A CDP acts as sort of a paper trail for data. You can see where your customer data came from, which is especially crucial in terms of compliance and privacy regulations like the GDPR and the CCPA. From a marketing perspective, you can also say with certainty that you don't collect data from third parties or that you only collect certain kinds of data. That's what customers want. Automation is Essential It's one thing to collect a lot of data. It's another to be able to use all of the data you gather in a meaningful way. The only way to do that today is through automation. Using AI and machine learning will allow you to pull those predictive insights from your data that make the difference between customers feeling known and appreciated, and simply getting irritated by the "spam" you continue to send them. It can even help with content generation—helping to change the content in real-time if a campaign isn't performing well or tweaking content to fit specific customers' taste. Not only that, but it will also save your teams lots of time and energy so they can focus on other more creative things. Trying to manage data without automation at this point in history would be completely pointless—there is simply too much to handle. And lastly: always be ready for the industry to upend itself. Just as we see right now with the impact of coronavirus, the most agile companies are the ones that can withstand the greatest sudden change. And change is the only thing we can expect in digital transformation. In the future, for instance, there may come a day when customers can demand payment for their data or lobby for the ability to hide data from companies altogether. Big data security is growing because the creation of data—and our appetite for it—continues to grow. Make sure your company is finding a similar benefit.