When Fresh Data Matters

How quickly does your business environment changes? Are your leaders using outdated information, and do they know it? Do you find your data is slowing your decision-making processes and preventing you from being truly agile? Imagine what you could do if you were to harness the power of real-time data.

Modern businesses operate in a constantly changing, intensely complex and data-rich environment. The term “dynamic” doesn’t come close to expressing how fast things are changing. Business environments are fluid – as soon as one thing moves, everything else shifts to adapt to the change. Just because you haven’t recognized the change yet, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. This is important for leaders to understand, because it means the information they use for decision-making, unless it is real-time data, doesn’t likely reflect the current reality. If they don’t have accurate information about how things are presently, then how can they be expected to make informed decisions about the future? Guessing is a scary strategy to run a business.

New technology for managing operational data

For many years, the method companies used to move data from one place to another was through batch processing and data warehousing. Data warehousing emerged as a response to three technical constraints:

1. Running analytics on operational systems slowed critical transactional performance.
2. Data needed to be consolidated from different operational sources to become a single source of truth.
3. Analytic workloads had different performance-tuning requirements than operational systems.

The good news is many of these technical constraints have now been relieved through advances in IT infrastructure, increased computing capacity and modern analytics tools. Unfortunately, even modern data warehousing tools have their shortcomings.

• Batch data loads lead to delays in current data.
• IT change-management policies meant to ensure data quality and security increases the development time for new insights.
• Tuning optimized for batch reporting doesn’t address ad-hoc query performance for discovery.

Tools like Vector from Actian can now enable you to access, integrate and analyze your operational data in near real-time – creating an operational data warehouse with the scale and economy of a data lake and the consistency and performance of a data warehouse. Unique features, such as vector processing on commodity servers, multi-cloud deployment and zero-performance overhead updates, make Vector the most capable foundation for an operational data warehouse. Instead of waiting for overnight batch processing, your business processes and decision makers can access fresh data to help them understand what is occurring in your company now.

New capabilities for driving increased impact

It may not be surprising that technology has advanced and enabled some new capabilities, which weren’t available a few years ago – this is the case in all industries and all facets of business. What is exciting is the impact these capabilities can have on your company:

• Accelerate business-process execution by avoiding data-replication delays
• Monitor real-time service availability and performance to prevent business disruption
• Fine-tune operations with real-time optimization to see immediate productivity and quality impacts
• Increase security and exposure to risk through real-time threat analysis
• Become more responsive and proactive with improved data for decision-making

The speed of change in your business environment is accelerating. To succeed in a fluid, complex and data-rich environment, your company needs the tools to manage your operational data more effectively, so you can transform it into meaningful information and actionable insights. By removing the data-processing delay, leaders can direct quick, informed and decisive actions that enable you to minimize risks and make the most of opportunities. Fresh data is the key to becoming a truly agile organization – you can’t reach that goal if you must wait 12–24 hours for your data to refresh.

Actian is the industry leader in hybrid data management, data integration and analytics. These solutions enable you to connect seamlessly and manage your operational and analytics data for superior performance, insights.