Data as a Service: Use Cases, Data Accuracy, Data Trusts


What are 7 examples of Data as a Service companies?

  • GrowthList β€’ Monthly reports with contacts of recently funded companies
  • Ahrefs β€’ Search queries, volume, links, keywords and more
  • JungleScout β€’ Search, market and product data for Amazon sellers
  • Crunchbase β€’ Public and private company data
  • Hunter β€’ Database of verified business and work emails
  • Cleaning the Glass β€’ NBA stats and insights
  • Here β€’ Location data for vehicles, logistics, supply chains and more


What are 7 use cases of Data as a Service?

  1. Consumer data, such as demographics, behavior, social media activity. This data can give insights into customer behavior and help to build personalized marketing campaigns and boost customer engagement.
  2. Nielsen offers data on TV audience behavior.
  3. Zonbase offers data on Amazon product sales.
  4. OnAudience offers profile data on website visitors.
  5. Industry data such as product trends and buying activities. This data can help to find new product ideas, spot buying patterns and build better sales funnels.
  6. Exploding Topics offers data on growing product trends.
  7. Glimpse tracks growing products, companies and industries.
  8. Treendly shares curated trends across dozens of countries and industries.
  9. Data on stock prices, market trends and other financial data. Investors can use this data to find investment opportunities and manage risks.
  10. Ticker Nerd shares US stocks worth noting.
  11. Growjo tracks the fastest-growing companies.
  12. PrivCo offers company, investor, funding, financial and deals data.
  13. Patient, clinical and other medical data. This data can help to develop new treatments, optimize healthcare services and improve patient outcomes.
  14. NINDS offers data on neurologic disorders.
  15. MIMIC offers health records of intensive care unit patients.
  16. openFDA offers data on medical device and drug adverse events.
  17. Data on traffic, weather, location and other data that impact transportation. This data can help to train self-driving cars, optimize routes, improve logistics and lower transportation costs.
  18. Scale offers training data for self-driving cars.
  19. Veraset offers data on people’s movements and visits.
  20. Mapbox offers traffic data for 30 billion road segments.
  21. OpenWeather offers weather forecasts and historical data.
  22. Data on energy consumption, production and distribution. This data can be used to optimize energy usage, reduce waste and improve the sustainability of organizations and communities.
  23. BP offers data on oil, gas coal, electricity, renewables and more.
  24. International Energy Agency offers data on energy consumption, waste and more.
  25. ENERGYDATA.INFO offers data on energy access and distribution in 193 countries.
  26. Data on public transportation, crime and other issues. This data can help to improve public services and safety.
  27. Waze offers data on road conditions, traffic and directions.
  28. ReportAll offers data on local community issues and incidents.
  29. Geolitica offers data on crime rates, heat maps and patrol operations.


What types of data are available through DaaS?

  1. Public and open-source data sets such as government data on population demographics, weather patterns or economic indicators.
  2. WorldPop offers spatial demographic data.
  3. OpenMeteo offers open-source weather data.
  4. The World Bank offers economic, social and other development data.
  5. Social media data such as usage patterns, user-generated content, comments and other activities.
  6. Twitter offers Tweets and account data.
  7. GummySearch offers data on Reddit posts and comments.
  8. MentionFunnel offers data on social mentions on Reddit, Twitter and Hacker News.
  9. Business data such as customer, sales, inventory, ad performance and supply chain data.
  10. Grepsr offers web data on cargo operations.
  11. Coresignal offers data on tech product reviews.
  12. Amazon Marketing Cloud offers data on ad signals and performance.
  13. Research data such as machine learning, medical, scientific and social science data.
  14. Knoema offers economic, social and demographic data.
  15. Hugging Face offers 25,000+ datasets for machine learning.
  16. Excelra offers custom chemistry, biology and clinical datasets.
  17. Alternative data such as web, location and environmental data.
  18. SimilarWeb offers web traffic and app usage data.
  19. Thinknum offers data on locations, prices, job listings and more.
  20. SafeGraph offers data on point-of-interest locations, geometry and more.


How does the Data as a Service business model work?

Data as a Service lets businesses access and use data from third-parties while outsourcing data management to data providers. DaaS business model can be broken down into a few parts:

  1. DaaS providers manage data collected by themselves or shared by third parties. They process, maintain and share data via cloud-based platforms or APIs. They also take care of scalability, security and data privacy.
  2. Customers pay a subscription fee to get access to different datasets with periodic or real-time updates. They also get access to data management features such as data enrichment, analytics and integrations.
  3. APIs and integrations let customers integrate data into their own applications, workflows or analytics tools.
  4. Customers pay based on the amount of data they access, the frequency of access or the level of data customization. They may also pay additional fees for API usage or integrations.


What is the difference between SaaS and DaaS?

SaaS (Software as a Service) and DaaS (Data as a Service) are both cloud-based service models, but with a different focus and value.

SaaS offers software applications over the internet that run on the provider’s infrastructure and are accessed through a web browser. With SaaS, businesses manage their own data. SaaS helps businesses automate processes and streamline operations such as accounting, hiring, project management and more.

DaaS provides access to data over the internet, typically through an API, that is hosted and managed by a third-party provider. With DaaS, data is provided and managed by third-party providers. DaaS helps businesses use third-party data to get better insights into markets, businesses and customers.


How does DaaS handle data security and privacy?

DaaS providers take various data security and privacy measures to ensure confidentiality, integrity and availability of data:

  1. Encryption of data both in transit and at rest to protect it from unauthorized access or interception. This can include using protocols such as SSL or TLS to encrypt data in transit, and AES or RSA encryption to encrypt data at rest.
  2. Access controls to ensure that only authorized users can access the data. This can include using multi-factor authentication, role-based access controls or IP whitelisting.
  3. Data masking to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access or exposure.
  4. Monitoring and auditing to detect unauthorized access attempts or suspicious activity.
  5. Data privacy policies to explain how they collect, store and use data. They ensure compliance with applicable laws such as GDPR and CCPA.
  6. Security certifications such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 to show their commitment to data security and privacy when managing data.


How can businesses ensure the quality and accuracy of the data they receive through DaaS?

To ensure the quality and accuracy of the data they receive through DaaS, businesses can:

  1. Check the reputation, certification and expertise of the DaaS provider.
  2. Check the credibility of data sources, data collection and processing methods.
  3. Use data quality assessment and cleansing services to ensure that the data is accurate, complete and consistent. Businesses can ask that these services be performed on the data before they access it.
  4. Validate the accuracy of data by comparing it to other data sources.
  5. Service-level agreements (SLAs) can be used to ensure that DaaS providers deliver data that meets agreed quality standards. Businesses should review the SLA to ensure that it meets their specific data quality requirements.


What is Insights as a Service?

Insights as a Service (IaaS) is a business model that lets customers skip data analytics and go straight to data insights. IaaS providers use advanced analytics and AI to:

  1. Find behavioral and statistical patterns in the data.
  2. Analyze historical data and predict future outcomes.
  3. Extract valuable insights from large and complex datasets.
  4. Help businesses visualize, explore and interact with data.


What are Data Trusts?

A data trust is a system of legal and technical measures that govern data sharing and management. Its purpose is to make it easier to share data between organizations by ensuring data security and privacy. It acts as an independent intermediary between data providers and data users.

Data trusts consist of:

  1. Legal framework that outlines the rules, policies and procedures for data sharing;
  2. Technology platform that collects, aggregates, protects and manages data.

Data trusts can be used in many industries such as healthcare, finance and the public sector.

For example, a data trust can be used to share health data between hospitals and research institutions for medical research purposes. Another example is the sharing of financial data between banks and financial institutions for credit assessment purposes.


What are the challenges and risks associated with using DaaS?

While Data as a Service (DaaS) offers several benefits to businesses, it also poses some challenges and risks. Some of the common challenges and risks associated with using DaaS are:

  1. Low data quality can lead to inaccurate or incomplete analysis and decision-making.
  2. Low data security can lead to unauthorized access or breaches of sensitive data.
  3. Low data privacy can lead to legal and reputational risks.
  4. Technical limitations can lead to the inability to integrate data with existing systems and processes.
  5. Vendor lock-in can make it hard for businesses to switch DaaS providers if they don’t meet their business needs anymore.
  6. DaaS can be costly. Especially if businesses need access to custom data, large amounts of data or advanced analytics features. Which can go beyond their budget and ROI expectations.


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