Data visualization describes techniques and tools that help people understand the meaning of data by representing it in a visual context. It’s often easier to identify important trends, correlations, and patterns in data which is presented visually rather than in its native format. Data visualization is particularly helpful in a Big Data landscape, in which many enterprises try to derive insights from huge data sets, with information obtained from myriad sources, including social media, enterprise software, and web analytics.

Read on to find out how data visualization is linked to another extremely relevant aspect of technology—responsive web design and responsive images..

The process of taking data from different systems and putting it into a data warehouse for business analysis can be a complicated affair. In this article, we look at what is involved and how the cloud has made matters potentially trickier.

A data warehouse is a relational database that is designed for query and analysis rather than for transaction processing. It usually contains historical data derived from transaction data, but it can include data from other sources..

In a world where organizations of all sizes gather vast quantities of data every single day, there is a real need to get insights from these huge data sets that drive better business decisions. After all, what is the point of collecting data from disparate sources if your business doesn’t get some benefit from all that information?

However, traditional database software cannot process and analyze such voluminous, complex data sets. This is, in essence, the problem that big data analytics solves, by providing powerful systems that can process and get insights from large data sets..

Marketing automation means using software platforms and tools to conduct marketing strategies more efficiently and effectively by automating repetitive tasks and processes. Typical tasks marketers might automate include segmenting customers based on interactions with a website, and managing email campaigns.

Marketing automation is a constantly evolving field, and as technology advances further and faster, marketing automation best practices today may not be relevant in five or ten years..

Both the volume and velocity of data growth in recent years are unprecedented. An IDC report found that digital data more than doubles every two years and will reach 44 zettabytes by 2020, 37 percent of which will be useful when analyzed.

To get data-driven insights which drive smarter business decisions, enterprises that collect data from many sources must have somewhere to store it for analysis. Businesses also need to store data for other uses, such as..

Modern enterprises gather data from many disparate sources, including social media, websites, customer databases (CRM systems, sales records etc), customer support systems, and HR software.

Merely collecting lots of data isn't useful in itself—it's the insights you get from such data that can drive more informed business decisions. This post aims to teach you about the bedrock processes required for obtaining insights from your data—ETL and ELT.

We'll begin by discussing data integration, before moving on to two vital forms of data integration—ETL and ELT. When you're finished reading, you'll fully understand what ETL and ELT are, and which process is better suited to your business in terms of getting actionable insights from different data sources..  

Agile test metrics and KPIs are measurements that enable Agile teams to assess how effective their software tests are and whether their testing efforts help achieve specific business objectives. An important aim of Agile software testing is to get testing up to speed with development—metrics and KPIs can assess the efficacy of the Agile testing team in this context.

In this article, you'll find out about the important difference between a metric and a KPI, and why you need to distinguish between the two. You'll also get some examples of KPIs and metrics relevant to Agile software testing efforts. Finally, you'll learn exactly how KPIs and metrics can lead to overall improvement in software testing within an Agile framework in addition to understanding some important measuring pitfalls..

Data warehouse security is vital for organizations that take the huge step of collating all their important data in one place. Unauthorized access to data warehouses can have devastating consequences, ranging from compromised customer information to exposing of high-level business intelligence that gives an enterprise its competitive advantage.

This article introduces warehouse security, discusses some of the challenges involved in securing a data warehouse, and offers some best practices for data warehouse security, including the use of FIPS 140-2 certified software and hardware..

This article describes how CoolaData implemented Druid to provide a real time infrastructure for its behavioral analytics platform, and discusses some benefits and limitations of Druid..

Written by Yair Harel, Senior Software Architect at CoolaData

In 2007 when we hosted the first The Finance and Investment Forum event in Cass Business School in London the data centre and cloud industry was still, in a sense, in it’s infancy. Even then few predicted not only the sector expansion but the technological advances and energy innovation that would come to recent prominence..