Making Your Data Platform Work For You

Note: This post was adapted from a version originally written for versor.com.au

According to a study by McKinsey and Company, around 94% of businesses are serviced by multiple cloud providers. Given that most companies only deploy around 20% of their applications to the cloud, and the average number of SaaS applications across these vendors is in excess of 170, there are literally hundreds of applications and data stores on which each company relies spread out across the planet.

It may be that businesses are wary of putting all their eggs in one basket by outsourcing their applications and data storage to a single cloud vendor. It may also be true that for the remaining 80% of applications and data that are on-premise, decision-makers believe that retaining local control is paramount, or that security concerns can be mitigated by keeping it mostly in-house.

However, this is not really the case. From a data point-of-view, the application spread that is evident when shared across on-premise and cloud, and indeed between different cloud environments, does not easily facilitate the combining of data sources to generate insights to power the business. Nor does the embedding of applications within a local network allow for easy upgrade and maintenance of either infrastructure or code. Difficulty finding appropriate technical expertise as well as unforeseen expenses can also ironically lead to poorer security outcomes, not better ones.

So what does all this mean?

Well clearly it is better to have both the applications and data all near each other. This will allow a business intelligence, analytics and data science platform to easily access, combine and federate the data. Deeper and more meaningful insights may be derived and presented to an audience that has a single point of access – via an online portal, simplifying the whole experience of interacting with the businesses’ digital identity.

And yes, by leveraging an online cloud provider most, if not all, of a company’s digital assets should be available online. The large well-known vendors such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google and IBM all provide state-of-the-art high-performing, affordable and secure cloud environments. Importantly, they all have an extremely diverse range of applications and services which are maintained for you. There is no need to perform complex installations or do back-ups, security and logging are embedded everywhere, and there are multiple service levels from which to choose. So all you have to do is to concentrate on using the data and applications to run your business.

This is all about streamlining your data platform experience. Using consultants who are highly skilled in all aspects of data platform design, build and deployment is essential. They need to excel at data engineering to outline, architect and build robust data engineering frameworks which will ensure your business operates on a reliable, trustworthy and integrated data back-bone. So too should the business intelligence team build high-end reports and dashboards to facilitate timely data-informed decisions; with the data scientist team applying advanced analytics and data science techniques to both embedded and stand-alone solutions to enable your business to achieve next-level performance in all facets of business operations.