The first step in this process depends on accurate data indexing and search.
There are billions of files in an average petabyte of enterprise storage, making manual data management solutions largely unfeasible.
This has resulted in companies having to empty their pockets and drown in funds in order to find a solution, with the average company spending $2.
5 million a year on data search.
This inability to instantly locate, search, index, access and mobilize the most current and accurate data greatly hinders executive insight and action.
Open-Source Enterprise Search Many vendors have sprung-up over the years to address this need, each with different architectures and solutions.
Yet amongst all the noise, Elasticsearch provides enterprises with a tangible solution through an open, modern and scalable architecture for building enterprise search capabilities.
Based on the powerful search engine apache Lucene, Elasticsearch has grown to become the most popular open enterprise search engine, with over 350 million downloads to date.
It is multi-tenant and distributed, which allows it to scale-out horizontally and handle billions of records across multiple indices.
It is schema-flexible, meaning you can add new fields to a record dynamically without having the rigidity of a traditional structured query language tables.
Search is near-instantaneous with records being available within about one second of being indexed.
Elasticsearch ushers in a new era of enterprise search capabilities.
So much so that a new enterprise search stack, termed “ELK” is emerging.
The solution is changing the game by providing a common framework for indexing an enterprise data set into a single, searchable view.
By indexing file shares and data sets, metadata is easily ingested and stored.
This metadata is a small fraction of the actual size of the data itself and a repository can be built economically.
With this solution, end users can also implement a faceted search in their data analysis.
Faceted search is akin to the kind of search one does when browsing a travel website, in which they refine their search based on multiple criteria.
For an enterprise, faceted search allows for users to search all files containing a phrase or word authorized by a specific user.
Ultimately, there are a number of open-source plug-ins for various enterprise data sources that are freely available.
In addition to downloading the software and running it internally, there are several ELK stack managed service providers that can provide an accelerated time to value.
However you decide to deploy, the possibilities for leveraging the ELK stack in your big data initiatives are boundless.
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