News

How does search solve data problems?

Is enterprise data a benefit or a burden?

Think about all of the data your organization generates and consumes in the digital age — from security event logs to application error messages, energy consumption to vendor contracts. There is so much, and all of it is usually stored in silos, making the data difficult to synthesize to provide better services, identify signals proactively, or make stronger business decisions. How do organizations overcome the challenges of understanding their data so that they can finally derive value from it, allowing organizations to truly put their data to work? 

The answer is to shift your organization’s thinking away from the complexity of consolidating data to how to better find the answers within it. More data can mean more insights, and those benefits hinge on the power of an effective search.

blog-why-elastic-data-types-sources-use-cases.png

The foundational data types that online, digital businesses extract insights from.

From burden to benefit

Let's take a look at three major challenges shared across online businesses:

  • Serving the right information in real time - Serving the right data to the right people in the right place at the right time is challenging. IDC notes that internal and external users NOT being able to find the right information costs businesses, on average, $2.5M per year.
  • Keeping systems up and performing - Developers, admins, and architects require tools to keep these increasingly complex digital ecosystems both available and performant. Downtime and poor performance can be costly. ITIC estimates that the cost of downtime amounts to, on average, $1.5M per hour.  
  • Protecting and securing applications and IT infrastructure - Security analysts require tools that enable them to protect an ever-growing attack surface. A single incident can impact both customer trust and, of course, the bottom line. IBM estimates that a single data breach, can on average, cost organizations $3.8M.

blog-why-elastic-data-types.png

The key to navigating all of these challenges is to first understand that they are connected. Fundamentally, each need is addressed by getting value out of an ever-growing, ever-evolving mountain of data in real time. So what’s search got to do with it? Search helps you to connect the dots and to put all that data to work. 

When you’re shopping online, being able to search, sort, filter, and locate exactly what you were looking for (and what stores nearby have inventory in stock) is powered by search and its unique ability to continuously surface relevant results from product catalog data. When a site reliability engineer troubleshoots a service or application, search enables them to perform root cause analysis with unprecedented speed by correlating logs, metrics, and trace data. And when you discover a vulnerability, search is uniquely capable of mining through security events data at scale.

Let’s say that an end user experiences slow information retrieval speeds, and a site reliability engineer notices an application going offline, which prompts the security operations center team to discover a series of security events. Successful teams should be empowered to figure out whether these events are coincidental or connected to something larger happening in the infrastructure.

All of this is possible with a search platform — a centralized data store, search engine, and analytics solution that can ingest, store, search, and analyze data of any type, from any source, and provide results in milliseconds (or less). One platform, from one vendor,  with one pricing model. (It’s us, Elastic. We’re that search platform.)

Search enables teams to break down the silos between the data and customers’ and employees’ day-to-day experiences. It helps us connect the dots, iterate, and work across use cases and business challenges. It ensures that we consistently exceed customer expectations, identify and resolve application and infrastructure issues before they happen, and helps protect and defend business investments.

With search, you turn business challenges into lucrative opportunities. 

Check out the “Why Elastic” keynote to dive deeper into the power of search. Download the Forrester study to see how business leaders are using search-powered technology to solve data problems.