Healthcare
Far more medical information can now be collected and analyzed in near real time, which helps doctors improve patient care. Coordinating data from medical records and comparing the results of case studies is essential for hospitals, doctors and health laboratories to gain insights. With so many healthcare devices now connected to the Internet and to each other, researchers are making connections between previously disparate sets of information, leading to breakthroughs in treatment. Big data is playing such a pivotal role in the healthcare industry that a recent study by EMC found that 59 percent of providers said that fulfilling their mission objectives objectives over the next five years will depend on the successful use of big data.

Telecommunications
Big data can power a single, unified view of telco customers, which helps providers deliver personalized, satisfying customer experiences. This single view helps you acquire new subscribers, grow existing relationships and retain valuable customers. According to research conducted by IBM, telecoms that have employed big data projects experienced a 92 percent decrease in processing time when analyzing network and call data. With better analytical efficiency comes improved service, customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Utilities
Utilities provide energy, measure its use and collect payment—but the system they manage is far from simple. When data is scarce, a utility’s ability to calculate outages, forecast service needs or coordinate maintenance is reduced to educated guesswork. With big data analysis of smart meter streams combined with other data, utility companies optimize the use of their generation and maintenance resources.

Banking
Financial institutions manage our money, and we expect them to protect our financial information. Big data improves the IT security posture of banks, analyzing network behavior to find suspicious or anomalous behavior. Apart from helping to improve cyber security, big data analysis can also improve a financial institution’s ability to calculate credit scores, set competitive interest rates and predict which customers are at risk of default on their loans.

Insurance
Insurance companies have to calculate hundreds of interrelated variables in order to coordinate policies for their clients. They need to accurately assess risk to properly price their products, and big data analysis makes those calculations much easier and faster to complete. Industry experts also suggest that big data can lead insurance companies to discover links between variables they never had the ability to consider before.

Travel
Travel companies decrease cost and improve traveler satisfaction by enriching existing data on travel routes and weather patterns with more detailed big data points on fuel costs, ticket prices and space availability. This detail allows them to improve logistics, safety and satisfaction.

Retail
The business problem of supply chain management is an ideal candidate for data-driven improvement. Either products are on the shelf when the customer wants to buy them, or they are not, and delivering supplies on time requires constant vigilance of thousands of ever-changing variables. Organizations with the most efficient and effective supply chains beat the competition, and big data analysis can help maintain ideal stock levels.