It is only natural that when Communications Service Providers (CSPs) think about “Big Data” stemming from their traditionally network-centric viewpoint, that their first thoughts are of the network. For many CSPs, Big Data means the need to manage extreme growth in subscriber data usage, carefully manage investments in expanded capacity, and ultimately find ways to process network records more efficiently to ensure that potential revenue leaks are plugged and profits maximized.

But Big Data is both a challenge and an opportunity that is receiving increasing focus across nearly every industry. And, many of these industries – health care, the public sector, and manufacturing to name a few – could hardly be called “network-centric.” Yet the need to collect, interpret, store, share and gain increasing insight from data is common to them all, and CSPs would be best served to think outside the network when it comes to assessing Big Data strategies and the benefits that these can deliver.