With the advancement in the field of computers and the interconnectedness provided by the internet, there has been an exponential growth in the use of web apps and mobile apps. Every business, organization, institution, and the government provides applications for interacting with people. This has generated a humongous amount of data every second, minute, and hour as these applications are used by billions of people.
With such an insanely huge amount of user data, it becomes ever more important to track, analyze and derive meaningful insights from this big data as anomalies or unusual behavior by users can be seen as potential cybersecurity threats and malicious intent. Therefore analysis of user data is generally used by cybersecurity experts to detect unusual traffic or behavior for protection against cybersecurity threats. This is what User behavior analytics which is a subdomain of big data comes in.
User behavior analytics applies big data and machine learning algorithms to data generated from user interaction in applications to recognize unusual patterns in user interaction with a system. These analytics not only helps business and organizations to defend against cybersecurity threats or malware but also helps in observing product trends, buying trends or geographic trends.
User behavior analytics is useful for companies and businesses that deal a lot with users and user-generated data. The advantages of User behavior analytics are:-
- Help identify potential cybersecurity threats
- Track user behavior
- Track trends in products, markets, interests, etc
Even though there are numerous promising advantages offered by User behavior analytics to a business it is very difficult to implement or deploy a User behavior analytics system for a business as it requires advanced tools, knowledge, and expertise. Also, the data has to be cleaned and fine-tuned for the analytics engine for analysis to work. This may be a complex and complicated process if the source data is highly unstructured. And the machine learning models may return false positives or show results with less accuracy.
User behavior analytics is used by almost every big business these days. Big companies like google Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix use these analytics for better customer evaluation, targeting products, and advertisements.
