Putting your information to work for you
Sponsored Do you ever get the feeling that you’re working for your data, rather than the other way around? Many on-premises data architectures have built up gradually over the years, creating a disjointed set of silos. It all works, but you probably don’t want to prod it too hard. These siloed architectures are brittle and prone to breakage. Because they’re production environments, that makes it difficult to do anything new with your data. Its latent value remains locked away. Moving data into a managed cloud environment is a good opportunity to break down those barriers and create a platform for innovation, says Rahul Pathak, Vice President, Analytics at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Data modernization isn’t something that the C-suite talked about, he explains, but that has changed lately. “Data has now become a board level conversation for most organizations,” says Pathak. “Because data over the last couple of years has become more important, companies are now realizing that we have to view it as a strategic asset.” This need for data-driven business has grown as companies feel greater pressure to reinvent themselves. Technology continues to morph business models. The old ways of doing things don’t work as well when new companies use mountains of customer and transaction data to develop new services that undercut and outperform the competition. So, organizations must find new ways of doing things to survive. Pathak adds that the pandemic sharpened the need for reinvention still further, as companies found themselves compelled to change the way they operated just to stay in business. “The classic example would be restaurant chains or hospitality where they had to build online assets, enable online ordering, and capture all of that data and fulfil those orders,” he says. Many companies either had to do that from scratch or scale up existing systems overnight. That involved a rush to the cloud as they took advantage of everything from remote working and collaboration through to online applications. Gartner anticipates that this will keep going, forecasting a 23 per cent increase in public cloud usage around the world in 2021. This move to the cloud goes beyond forklifting existing applications into virtual machines or using SaaS products; it also involves changing the way that companies think about data once it’s in a cloud environment. The cloud promises some attractive benefits, including agility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness, but capturing those benefits means managing data differently. In short, it means building a modern data architecture that puts the cloud front and centre. It takes some planning to build this cloud-centric data model, says Pathak, adding that Amazon has spent years honing the process through its internal expertise and its network of partners. The company breaks it down into three steps: modernization, unification, and innovation. The modernization part involves migrating databases to a cloud-based data infrastructure. Typically, companies begin with their own on-premises data infrastructure including proprietary licenses. Some companies approach this migration in steps, beginning with a simple lift-and-shift migration into the cloud where companies bring their SQL Server or Oracle databases in a VM.
