By Deb Dutta – General Manager, Asia Pacific and Japan, Datastax
Succeeding in today’s competitive business environments, ultimately comes down to insightful and timely data-driven decision-making. Efficiency in data usage has never been more critical to business success, and the ability to process and analyse data in real time, will be crucial in reducing costs and speeding up time-to-market.
However, extracting true value from rich data repositories continues to be a complex challenge for developers and enterprises – especially for real-time use. Today, most data functions used by businesses for their applications are monolithic and inefficient, rather than designed to meet customer expectations quickly. This increases data latency which may be acceptable in use cases such as generating quarterly reports, but is a significant setback for today’s real-time use cases such as fraud detection, in-the-moment product recommendation engines, mobile coffee orders, device to data analysis (IoT) for example.
Why enterprises must tap on the data-intrinsic value of ‘now’
To optimise decision-making, enterprises have focused efforts on improving data literacy within their teams to enable gathering, storing and analysing of large datasets. Although they have been able to drive considerable automation and growth with this data, it is only the tip of the iceberg and many businesses are still some ways off from unlocking limitless innovative transformations that data can enable.
In the quest for secure, smarter workflows within digitised environments, enterprises have explored several tools that could enable them to fully leverage the existing information at hand. Tools in the past have provided high level, backward-looking data analytics by aggregating internal and external sources, but were unable to manage the rapid ingestion of operational data and deliver quick strategic responses to business events. With the emergence of cloud-powered architectures, new data storage models were also developed to transform data storage capabilities.
Yet, the core challenge of sourcing valuable insights from data to inform and empower businesses, remains unresolved. Precious customer information continues to be trapped in silos and is unavailable to fuel real-time , engaging applications within the required timeframes. While there are tools to aid in the elimination of external data silos, complex data architectures used to harvest data within the company can inadvertently create new operational data silos. Entering into a rapidly advancing technology landscape, enterprises that do not bridge these gaps will fall back and fail to tap on the disruptive benefits of data.
So, how can enterprises truly make data work for them, drive critical processes, customer satisfaction and increase revenue?
Delivering more value, faster with real-time data
Siloed data from various enterprise applications, stored on-premises or even on public clouds, usually has the propensity to be unused and redundant. The key to transport data, as a high-value yet under-leveraged asset, towards building capabilities to manage its scale and growth, lies in freeing data so that it is available to the entire data ecosystem including data lakes, data warehouses, etc. .
Organisations need to bridge data flow from high value business events to real-time applications in-the-moment When business leaders have consistent insight into what is happening in the here-and-now, they can empower every application to meet the end-user with instantaneous action. Such real-time analytics captures information as it happens, removes silos and creates strategic intelligence tied to vital changes or events, as frequently as data teams require.
But this potential of real-time data is yet to be harnessed fully. According to a recent McKinsey study, only a fraction of data from connected devices is processed and queried in real time, due to challenges of adopting modern data architectures. These challenges can be resolved by advanced streaming databases, that re-conceive how enterprises use their existing data pools.
Real-time streaming technologies feed new types of data from several sources into information hubs, equipping analysts to control the narrative around organisational data and derive more incisive insights. It empowers technology leaders to tap into live streams of data globally and make critical developments on the go. This enables zero-latency, improved scalability and the ability to translate real-time data into revenue generating opportunities.
By activating data in real-time, customers and companies can get smarter together, while enterprises deliver exceptional, up-to-date digital experiences. By having access to high computational intensity that does not sacrifice speed, businesses will no longer be hamstrung by obsolete data and manual limitations. With real-time analytics and an advanced digital strategy in place, business leaders can deliver innovation, productivity and intelligence to developers and enterprises at scale. When implemented the right way, access to real-time data offers the competitive edge, enterprises could massively benefit from.
