While the push toward modern, highly scalable, fast, and agile data platforms is regarded as vital for enterprise success, change management remains a key challenge. Between overcoming data silos to performance bottlenecks, poor data quality and governance, cost inefficiencies, legacy systems, and potential disruption, transitioning to modernity is an all-encompassing effort with plenty of points of failure.
In DBTA’s webinar, Building a Modern Data Platform: Trends and Best Practices, experts from CData Software and Informatica offered their expertise on how to successfully navigate data platform modernization, examining its various nuances and paths to value.
According to Jerod Johnson, senior technology evangelist, CData Software, creating a modern data foundation is both more urgent—and more complicated—than ever. Citing CData Software research, 62% of IT leaders say their organizations aren’t equipped to harmonize data systems to fully leverage AI—a forerunning reason for data platform modernization.
Johnson further noted the following as major complications impeding or complicating modernization:
- Exponential growth of data sources and destinations: Large enterprises now manage over 664 different applications and are adding an average of 11 new applications every 30 days.
- Growing diversity of users who need to access data: 57% of IT professionals spend more than half their work week servicing data requests.
- Increasing demand for diverse integration types: Increasing architectural complexity and greater diversity of use cases requires multiple integration patterns.
At CData Software, “We believe that unlocking connectivity is one of the major steps in building a foundation for a modern data platform,” said Johnson. The CData Connectivity Platform is foundational for creating a modern data platform, offering capabilities for live data access, data movement, and a variety of data connectors, Johnson explained.
Johnson then detailed four case studies of data platform modernization for NJM Insurance, Credit Agricole, Office Depot, and Quest with CData. Through each of these case studies, Johnson concluded that the following are top modernization best practices:
- Automate time-consuming tasks
- Adopt unified frameworks
- Democratize and decouple data access
- Embrace hybrid methods and architectures
As Abhilash Mula, senior manager, product management, data integration, Informatica, put it, “Modernization is not just about upgrading technology but it’s really about helping…business move faster, make decisions faster, and basically stay ahead of the market.” To achieve this, there are three main strategic business priorities for data platform modernization as it applies to data and analytics:
- Improve productivity and efficiency.
- Enable better and faster decision making.
- Support data democratization.
Yet, echoing Johnson, Mula emphasized that there are still data challenges preventing true modernization, such as:
- Data silos: 81% of IT leaders state that data silos hinder their digital transformation efforts.
- Data fragmentation: 80% of organizations store more than half of their data in a multi-cloud infrastructure.
- Skills shortage: 90% of organizations are projected to experience IT skills shortage by 2026.
- Cost overrun: 66% of enterprise software projects experience cost overruns.
- Complex technology landscape: 87% of organizations operate in hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
- Legacy systems: 80% of IT budgets are spent on maintaining legacy systems.
Mula suggested that the solution lies within the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), a comprehensive platform designed to unify, manage, and empower data across the organization. Combining the best data management products with AI-powered metadata intelligence and automation, as well as high connectivity, IDMC supports multi-vendor, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments.
This is only a snippet of the full Building a Modern Data Platform: Trends and Best Practices webinar. For the full webinar, featuring more detailed explanations, case studies, a Q&A, and more, you can view an archived version of the webinar here.