In effect, the client passes the very small amount of data from keypresses or console clicks to a data centre, and streams the video and audio resulting from those clicks back down the pipe to the screen.

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Technologies like Splunk were built to help IT staff search and summarize machine data, but with just a small amount of enhancement web server log data can track in real time the flow of customers through pages, the products that are going into shopping carts, and the rate of transactions.

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Microsoft Excel is a user-friendly spreadsheet application that is well-suited for an individual or small number of people to process a modest amount of data.

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Most businesses, even small ones, already collect such an enormous amount of data that, even if they could find a reasonably-priced and skilled data scientist to hire, that person would quickly be overwhelmed unless there was a rational approach to distilling and translating that data, and a usable set of tools with which to do it.

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