Just because your business does not have the resources to build like a tech giant doesn’t mean you can’t think like one. Small companies, and startups are usually bootstrapping their first few versions of a product, but there are plenty of low cost decisions that companies can make to put them in a great position when it comes time to scale. We want to try and give you digestible tips on things you can do to prepare your business and data for future growth.
Sounds deep I know, but I promise this will not go woo woo on you. If you think of your data as a changing system that exist in some current state then every-time you change that data it can be considered a state change.
If you backup your data, you are only capturing the state of your data at the time it is backed up, and have a very limited snapshot of your system. On the other hand, if you save every one of those transactions, or state changes, then you have the ability in the future to analyze how that system changed over time.
At the least, you need to be saving your data transactions or state changes for your mission critical system. This means every write, update, delete, and read. Think of your data state changes as an immutable log. You can very cost effectively save these states. This allows you to recreate any snapshot, at any state, at any time. Data warehousing is extremely cheap these days. Amazon S3 can be accessed for up to .023/GB cents per month.
This is very powerful. Imagine if you could go to the doctor with a report of every single thing that happened in your body in between appointments. You can do this with your data! Even though you may not currently have the resources to analyze this data and dig into your system, in the future we can use very powerful systems to apply machine learning and provide valuable business intelligence about customers, and business.
Big Data Enthusiast and lover of all things distributed and scalable.