Extra tags: Digital Transformation
Data is at the centre of today’s digitally transforming businesses. However, as they embrace new, more advanced and cloud-centric technologies, they have to also transform how they store, analyse and manage their data. Failure to do so in the midst of today’s highly complex and varied IT environments, and they won’t be able to have control or visibility over their data, which will ultimately result in failure to obtain actionable insights and make informed decisions that will benefit the business.
So, as you migrate to new technologies, first and foremost, you need to build a robust data foundation that can keep up with the pace of change that you will undoubtedly experience. This is because having such a foundation will help you put your data to good use, no matter where it may reside – be it on-prem, in the cloud or on the edge. But that begs the question: How can one build this solid data foundation?
A good first step is to leverage a data platform that is cloud-ready, as the cloud is where you can scale your data and give it the agility and flexibility you will need. Moreover, the cloud makes data more accessible and available, in part, due to multiple data centres ensuring redundancy. Data is also safe and secure in the cloud, with most cloud providers offering different layers of security and protection protocols, like encryption and data management.
This doesn’t mean you have to go all-in on the cloud and abandon your on-prem investments? Not at all. In fact, embracing a hybrid cloud strategy will give you the best of both worlds so to speak as both the public cloud and private cloud work in tandem to enable better ease of use, elasticity and self-service—features one would expect from cloud-native services. A hybrid environment will also let you optimise your existing data, utilise new resources and leverage the latest innovations.
The next step is to create a data pipeline that will let you make the most out of your hybrid environment. This is where Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) comes in. One of the challenges enterprises face in a hybrid environment is finding a streaming data platform that spans seamlessly across the hybrid cloud. Cloudera DataFlow (CDF), a feature of CDP, helps in that regard, supporting the entire spectrum of streaming data capabilities—from data capture and flow management at the edge to data provisioning and stream processing and analytics engines. Critically, you get all that without being burdened by the different infrastructure requirements to develop and configure them.
One company that has built this solid data foundation using CDP is ExxonMobil, whose collated data spans 100 years of digital records. In other words, it has accumulated massive amounts of data but they were largely unstructured and mostly dispersed in various formats—and across multiple locations.
As such, finding data proved extremely hard, and accessing and analysing it proved even harder. That was pre-CDP. Post-CDP, ExxonMobil staff can now access data faster and easier and use it in making data-driven decisions. That’s thanks to Cloudera’s on-prem tools and, critically, its cloud services, like advanced Machine-Learning-assisted Natural Language Processing (NLP) that enables the organisation to analyse unstructured data.
You can do the same for your business with CDP, and it would be a good idea to start now. To find out how Cloudera can help you build a solid data foundation and unlock the power of data, click here.
