What is dark data ? The large amount of data collected by companies that goes useless due to lack of analysis(39%) or structure(25%) or even sometimes due to lack of proper tools(13%) is known as the dark data. If used/analyzed properly gives a new dimension to the companies.

But how can we harness the dark data. Well it’s no rocket science , just some simple measures and you have a whole new dimension of data.Here are just a few of them :-

• Keep a track of user logins and various checkout at different locations, this helps in creating a 360-degree view of the user.

• Mobile phone data, this will help to illuminate an array of new product and marketing opportunities, and hence improve marketing effectiveness.

• Free text input, such as feedback can be analysed to determine if general sentiment of the feedback is positive or negative.

Data when properly harnessed can be a powerful and can serve as a gateway to new insights, developing new opportunities and boosting your business into the data-driven century.

You can read more at http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/dark-data-the-billion-dollar-opportunity

Companies of every shape or size recently have moved to Big Data as they realized how beneficial it is for their organizations. To efficiently use the big data, companies need to collect and process it first, from multiple sources. Some data remains unused in the case of unstructured data mostly, which poses a problem later leading to clogging up data centres. Such unused data has been termed as – Dark Data which needs to be cleaned up or else it increases security risk and costs for the companies. Dark Data firstly needs to be identified. It is the information collected but not put to any specific use. Such data remains unused for years and takes up a lot of space which could have been used otherwise to store useful data. Dark Data remains unprotected for a while and poses risk of security breaches and mishaps. Dark Data is costly and dangerous but still companies keep them to make sure they don't lose any kind of records. Cleaning of Dark Data is time consuming but is important as well. One of the most effective ways of avoiding such data is by filtering the data which prevents data from piling up. Other ways to clean such data is by moving the Dark Data to different repositories using cloud computing. Dark Data can be deadly for organizations and hence it should be avoided before it poses any problem for the business.

 Read more at:  http://www.smartdatacollective.com/rick-delgado/323706/importance-cleaning-your-dark-data