Harvest External Data to Improve Internal Data

Every business oversees a wealth of data — whether they realize it or not. Employee ID numbers, customer transactions, email lists and social media handles: it’s all information companies collect over time.

But the data you save internally isn’t enough to keep your business competitive in 2015. It’s vital to harvest external data to improve and augment your products and services.

Internal vs. External Data: What’s the Difference?

Internal data is pretty easy to understand. It’s everything your business creates and generates, such as customer information or transaction details.

As the name implies, external data comes from outside your system. There’s an endless amount of information on the Internet throughout the Surface Web, Deep Web and Dark Web, and obviously, your team doesn’t have time to manually dig through the millions of Web pages for relevant information,

That’s where Big Data-as-a-Service comes into play.

It allows us to dig through the chaos of the Web to get you information that is usable and actionable. We pull usable, enriched data and customize it to your needs. The end result is a relevant report or dashboard cultivated from the billions of available sources online — without your team spending endless hours manually searching the Internet.

How Can You Use External Data?

External data, also referred to as open source intelligence (OSINT), helps businesses supplement data they don’t currently have. It’s true across all industries, for companies large and small.

We’ve seen risk management professionals, insurance providers, and banking entities all use large, external data sets to improve their organization.

Take for example a company working in insurance. This business is tasked with increasing efficiency and building revenue, and that starts with identifying risk for their clients. An insurer couldn’t do this without large amounts of data.

Some agencies can look to credit scores or arrest records, but that’s hardly enough information to make an informed decision about risk potential — especially when that data isn’t available in all areas.

BrightPlanet fills in the gaps by gathering data for insurance providers using social media, news and other data sources available on the Web so they can make the most informed decision possible about who to insure.

Data-as-a-service For Your Business

External data sets can be used in ways most people wouldn’t even imagine. The opportunities in Big Data-as-a-Service are only limited by your creativity.

If you want to learn about data-as-a-service, reach out to us. We can explain how to use external data to augment your own internal data. We can also give you a free consultation on how to put the power of the Web to use.