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There was a time when software development companies had to tackle countless key things before starting a new project. From networking, storage, servers, operating systems (OS), data to applications! Early on, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) came into picture, followed by PaaS (Platform as a service) that provided you with the operating system. SaaS (Software as a Service) came eventually and this time, you have the tools to build your software solution. And now we have turned to DaaS, Data as a Service to make the most use of huge data available in today’s online world. DaaS companies extract data from the target sites by web scraping, making it accessible to their customers in the required formats.
Importance of The Three Vs of Data in DaaS
Before we go deeper into DaaS and its benefits, let’s talk about the three Vs of data that will actually determine whether you need to have a DaaS. The three common Vs of data are:
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1. Volume
One of the most important aspects when dealing with data extraction is the volume. Depending on the amount of data that you are trying to crunch, a lot of decisions might change. Whether you are processing data in MBs, GBs, or even PBs; data cleanliness is critical and it becomes more difficult to handle when you have a larger data volume. Depending on the volume, you would also need to take decisions like where to store the data, how to make it available to different teams, etc.
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2. Variety
Scraping one website and extracting its data from time to time is one thing and keeping a track of all your competitors and scraping all their data regularly is a different ball game altogether. Why?
Well, let’s say you are a news aggregator who is trying to crawl data from your 10+ competitors on a daily basis. At least some of your competitors’ website layout is bound to change once a week. You will then have to make changes in the web scraper setup to adapt to the new changes.
As more changes take place and you keep adding new competitors, you will have to add new web scraping rules, as well as make sure they keep working and adapting to new changes in websites. When looking to crawl web data, you obviously have to go for a wide variety of sources to keep your data game going strong. DaaS helps you exploit the wide data variety available in IoT today.
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3. Velocity
Do you need updated data from websites every second or every month? The difference between the two can be magnanimous. You might need a completely separate data processing server setup for the first one as well as a dedicated team to make sure that your server never goes down.
The speed and frequency at which you need the scraped data to be updated can be a major point to look at before setting up your infrastructure and getting into a conversation with a web scraping service provider.
What is DaaS and Why do you Need It?
Organizations are becoming data driven, for almost every business decision and function. Apart from business data, data mining and extraction from web scraping solution is turning out to be norm of the day.
Regular and updated data feed from multiple sources, is proving to be the fuel to business growth. Running internal web crawls or using data scraping tools could be the solution for limited data needs. However this model is not recommended if you need large volume and variety of data at higher velocity.
For professional data extraction and data maintenance, we recommended an experienced DaaS (Data as a Service) provider that would scrape data and provide the end solution in the required data formats. As for updating and maintaining the data crawler, the service providers would be taking care of that as well.
Data-Driven or Intuition?
Data is the new oil, and how you use it in your business might actually make or break your company’s profitability in the long run. Basing your decision making engine on a regular stream of updated data and insight gathered from it, might do much better than intuition.
Realising your ‘data-driven company’ dream is much easier today, thanks to the growth hacking with DaaS. Even without a technical in-house team, data scraping can easily meet the 3Vs of your data requirement. So make the most of it, while your competitors are busy playing catch-up.
