Top 5 Issues in Data Warehousing for IT Leaders

With more and more companies embarking on digital transformation journeys, the focus on enterprise data is greater than ever. Data warehousing is not a new concept, but recent developments in the industry are generating a new wave of executive interest and the need to modernize both the approach and solutions for how enterprise data is managed. Here are the top 5 issues that IT leaders are facing when charting a future course for data warehousing capabilities.

Security

It is no surprise that information security and risk management are top of mind for most IT leaders. In the data warehousing space, this means not only physical security against hacking, data loss, etc. but also securing the company’s intellectual property against unauthorized use. Data is increasingly becoming a strategic asset that companies can use to develop and sustain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Benefiting the most from your data involves making it easily accessible for those people who need to use it while maintaining the confidentiality of sensitive company data and personal data about customers.

Performance

Data warehouse performance has elevated into a top issue since 2018 with the proliferation of digital transformation initiatives that more deeply embed technology and data within transactional business processes. These new digitally enabled processes depend on real-time data to provide staff with the insights they need both to sustain productivity as well as support informed decision-making. The data warehouse is very important to the support of a company’s data consumption needs and does so by providing a set of capabilities for aggregating data across multiple sources, performing large-scale analytics and refinement processes, and making data available to consuming users and IT applications. Cloud-based technologies and in-memory computing enable modern data warehouses to move massive amounts of data extremely fast – creating an information engine for modern business.

Flexibility

Companies’ IT environments are not homogeneous, nor are they stable. There are a great variety of infrastructure configurations, including, for example, on-premises data centers, public cloud, private cloud, and SaaS solutions that are involved in a company’s data value stream. Not only are IT leaders faced with ecosystem diversity, but they are also challenged with a rapidly accelerating pace of technological change. For data warehousing, this means companies need the flexibility to support the various deployment modalities that exist today within their IT environments without being locked into a specific solution that would impede their ability to change course in the future.

Cost

Data growth within modern companies is accelerating faster than ever. IoT, cloud services, mobile apps and 3^rd party data feeds are just some of the examples of new data sources that are causing the growth curve of data warehouse capacity to exceed significantly forecasts from a few years ago. This creates a troubling cost challenge for IT leaders who are tasked with enabling new business capabilities while simultaneously reducing IT operational costs. Many companies are in the process of migrating their data-warehouse capabilities to the cloud where storage is cheaper and more scalable – eliminating the operating costs of on-premises data centers and storage hardware that become obsolete and depreciate in value rapidly.

Speed of Deployment

Businesses are evolving faster than ever and, as they do, executives expect IT systems to adapt just as quickly to support emerging needs and opportunities. For data warehouse systems, this translates to speed of deployment – both in terms of new data sources for ingestion as well as new consuming systems (such as AI and advanced analytics systems). Companies are faced with a shrinking window of time to maximize the value from opportunities and mitigate risks/threats. Since data is so integral to informing business decisions, data warehouse solutions (both new systems and changes) must be quick to deploy and easy to change.

Enterprise data has never been more important to companies than it is today. IT leaders face a big challenge to evolve their technological capabilities rapidly to support business needs and the data warehouse is recognized as the core of the modern IT ecosystem. Actian provides companies with a set of modern capabilities for ingesting data from all your data sources, processing it quickly and effectively at scale and then making data easily accessible to those people and systems within the organization that need to use it. To learn more, visit www.actian.com/data-platform.

About Actian Corporation

Actian is helping businesses build a bridge to a data-defined future. We’re doing this by delivering scalable cloud technologies while protecting customers’ investments in existing platforms. Our patented technology has enabled us to maintain a 10-20X performance edge against competitors large and small in the mission-critical data management market. The most data-intensive enterprises in financial services, retail, telecommunications, media, healthcare and manufacturing trust Actian to solve their toughest data challenges.