The Importance of Third-Party Data for Modern Business Analytics

Modern hybrid data environments handle data from multiple sources and this entails a new set of complexities. One particular type of data is external data or third-party data from external sources and it can be extremely useful to businesses but poses certain challenges. However, it can be extremely valuable to drive business value.

What is Third-party Data?

Third-party data is essentially external data that has a source outside the organization. There are 4 types of external data. They vary in aspects such as access, cost, sources, structure and more.

1. Open Data

Open data is typically from governments and NGOs. It is semi-structured and unstructured data that is freely available and can be accessed on open data platforms, meta platforms and direct links.

2. Paid Data

Paid data is structured data that is available at a cost from professional providers of such data. It is accessible from dedicated portals or software.

3. Shared Data

Shared data may be structured, semi-structure or unstructured and is from internal company sources or other shared by businesses in the same ecosystem. Fees may be charged by an intermediary and it is accessible through a bilateral exchange or an intermediary.

4. Social Media Data

Social media data is unstructured data that is user-generated. It is freely available, but may be subject to copyrights in some cases. It is accessible from web-crawling various social media platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) or official access points.

Importance of Third-party Data in Analytics

Such external, third-party data can be extremely useful to businesses.  It can provide powerful data-driven insights that would otherwise remain undiscovered. You can improve data analytics with third-party data to improve the model quality of your analytics algorithms. This helps uncover trends and seize opportunities. This is applicable in areas such as HR, customer relationship management, supply chain as well as warehousing.

Insights from this data can be used to improve business processes. For example, several companies use additional information such as weather and traffic conditions to optimize their deliveries. Similarly uncovering valuable insights from external data in your sphere of business can help you optimize your service or product delivery and serve customers better.

When you use external, third-party data sources, it improves your data management capabilities as you will have to improve this data quality. This is easily extended to enriching and improving internal data quality, raising the overall quality of all your data.

Most important of all, external, third-party data can be a powerful driver of innovation. Utilize insights from this data to discover gaps in the market and introduce exciting new products and services to serve customers and capitalize on untapped opportunities.

Picking the right solution is crucial for data migration, modernization and improving the quality of third-party data. DataSwitch is a trusted partner for cost-effective, accelerated solutions for digital data transformation, migration and modernization through a Modern Database Platform. Our no code and low code solutions along with enhanced automation, cloud data expertise and unique, automated schema generation accelerates time to market. It is faster, highly cost-effective, eliminates error-prone manual effort and completes the project in half the typical time frame. Prepare and integrate third-party data and service the data using DS Integrate and DS Democratize while ensuring that the data is trustworthy. In our next blog we will explore the various aspects and challenges of managing third-party data.

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