Future-Proof Your Data-Driven Business with Modern Data Platform

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One of the building blocks of digital transformation is a modern data and analytics platform that harnesses data’s power to reveal patterns and make predictions. All data-driven organizations use data in three ways:

  • To report on the past,
  • To understand the present, and
  • To predict the future

Nowadays, Cloud Data Lakes and Data Warehouses are the most vital IT assets as they serve the fundamental building blocks to run today’s fast-moving businesses that take advantage of practically unlimited storage space, scalability, elasticity, and business agility characteristics of a public cloud. Most large enterprises, mainly Healthcare, BFSI and Retail, have realized that they require a modern data platform architecture to stay competitive in the market, to serve their customers and maintain long-term relationships. Therefore, a modern data platform must be an open platform that integrates easily with the operational systems and applications that end-users are working with. In this article, I have given a bird-eye view of what, why, and how to adopt a Modern Data Platform.

Legacy Data Platform vs Modern Data Platform Opportunities:

Data Platform Modernization is no longer a choice, and every data-driven enterprise depending on data for its decision-making process is rethinking its data strategy. The main challenges related to traditional data warehouses are lack of governance, complex architecture, outdated technology, and slow performance. It is also built on top of SQL-based systems that have not fully evolved to handle the amount and diversity of today’s data. The main advantages of adopting a Modern data platform are to achieve AI adoption, real-time use of data, and enable DevOps principles for data management.

The Modern Data Platform consists of multiple specialized components optimized for workloads to manage, process, and analyze new data, whether in larger volumes, unstructured formats or in real-time. The Modern Data Platform can serve as the single ingestion point for all new data and accelerates advanced data analytics initiatives by combining traditional and nontraditional approaches to federate relational & non-relational data stores into one cohesive architecture.

Modern Data Platform Capabilities and Business Use Cases:

Industry SegmentUse Cases
Health Care360-degree view of patients’ health report Genomic data analytics Predictive medical costs Connected Care Data Lake
Banking Services, Financial and InsuranceRisk AnalysisFraud DetectionClaims prediction Personalized marketing
Retail and EcommerceRecommendation SystemsPersonalized MarketingInventory ManagementLocation of New StoresCustomer Sentiment Analysis
Telecom IndustryPredictive AnalyticsReal-time AnalyticsLocation-based Promotions
AutomobilePredictive Vehicle MaintenanceDriver Monitoring SystemDriver Behavior AnalyticsCustomer Support Chatbot

Modern Data Platform Benefits:

There are massive benefits to use a Modern Data Platform to enable better data management. Your business processes and decisions can become more efficient, innovative, and cost-effective with the capabilities. 

  • Optimize Operating Costs and Time: Built-for-purpose components means your team spends less time gathering and structuring data and more time generating insights that will contribute to business success.
  • Future-proofing your business: A modern data platform will help you thrive in an increasingly disrupted ecosystem.
  • Harness AI and Machine Learning: Lays the foundation for advanced analytics and innovation.
  • Efficient Data Processing: A key component of the data pipeline, that enables the flow of data from a source into a data warehouse or other end destination. 
  • Make smarter and faster decisions: A data platform solution will bring together multiple data sources, powering analysis and reporting. This enables faster, better-informed customer and business decisions.
  • Secure Organization’s data: Regular audits and penetration tests ensure your data stays safe and secure.

Building a Cloud-based Modern Data Platform

A Modern Data Platform is a future-proof architecture for Business Analytics. It is a functional architecture with all components to support modern data warehousing, AI/ML development, and Real-time data ingesting & processing. It has eight components – data ingestion, warehouse, lakehouse, data transformation, data science, governance, business intelligence, and data privacy. It helps enterprises store all their data in one central location in a consolidated and synchronized form for discovery, management, and distribution, i.e., it manages the end-to-end data lifecycle. The following tech stack, can be used for creating a modern data platform. 

  • Data Storage: AWS S3, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Google Cloud Storage
  • Data Processing Engines: Databricks or Spark; Athena, Presto, or Starburst

Conclusion

In this digital era of business, the modern data platform is the ultimate answer to all data and decision-making problems. For any sizable company, a state-of-art data and analytics platform is necessary. Now is the right time to invest and build a future-ready data ecosystem that delivers path-breaking insights and business opportunities. By investing in building a modern data analytics platform, one can take their business and customer experience to the next level with a clear strategy that is vital to the business.

About the author:

Rabi Prasad Padhy is CTO at Crayon Software Experts India.