When managing big data, organizations will find that there will be many consumers of the vast amounts of data, ranging from applications and data repositories to humans via various analytics and reporting tools. After all, the data is an expression of the enterprise, and with digital transformation, that enterprise is increasingly expressed in the…
Part 2: Cloud Service Security In my previous post on modern data warehouse security, we looked at issues related to database security. This post will focus on the separate, but related issue of cloud service security, which is increasingly important since nearly half of all data warehouses are hosted in the cloud.[1] The economics…
Database Security: Part 1 Did you know that security breaches involving the cloud now surpass breaches involving on-premise infrastructure? According to the Verizon 2021 Data Breach Investigation Report, 73% of cybersecurity incidents involved external cloud assets—compared with 27% only one year ago.[1] Having just joined Actian from a cloud security provider, even I was…
Data: the Beating Heart of Healthcare Payers, health plans, and integrated health systems run on data. Integration, processing, and analytics are integral to their business process and managing of costs and risk. The role of payers in the healthcare industry has been expanding for years. As care models have shifted from fee-for-service to coordinated…
Data Lakes, Data Warehouses, and Data Hubs - Do we need another choice? There’s a long-standing debate, dating back to the early days of Hadoop, about what kind of data repository is best for a given data analytics use case. A Data Lake? A Data Hub? A Data Warehouse? Despite Hadoop’s fall from grace,…
Why Performance Matters My very first sales call to an analytics prospect was with a customer using an OLTP database for reporting. Some of their reports took hours to run and one particularly challenging report typically ran for more than thirteen hours. Our performance benchmarking had shown that for analytics workloads, Actian would be…
This month, GigaOm published a comprehensive evaluation of leading cloud data warehouse services based on performance and cost. Offerings analyzed included Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure Synapse, Google BigQuery, and our very own Actian Avalanche. There are many intriguing results included in the report, but an indisputable conclusion was reached by GigaOm: "In a…
What is a modern data platform? When we ask this question, we get two different groups of answers. The first group is around the technology needed for data processing in today's business environment. In this group, the answers mention things like cloud services, containers, and on-prem. The second set of answers involves sources of…
Customer loyalty is the key to profitability in the telecom industry. Because telecom providers manage large fixed infrastructures that must be offset by revenue, customer churn (attrition) is particularly problematic in this industry. Low switching costs for customers (supported by government regulations) mean that customer loyalty is the only real tool that telecom companies…
Data warehouse modernization. Sounds like a no-brainer. Move your Netezza, Teradata or Exadata data warehouse that likely runs on obsolete, proprietary hardware to a shiny new system that runs in the cloud, costs a fraction of what you were paying before and can be turned on and off like a light switch. Is it that easy? That simple?…
The speed of change in modern business is accelerating. New technologies, globalization, regulatory changes and competitors entering and leaving the market are just a few examples of the types of environmental forces that bombard companies every day. Developing a sustainable, competitive advantage requires company leaders to identify and respond to opportunities and threats quickly,…
I was fortunate enough to attend the Actian Hybrid Data Conference at which Craig Strong, who is Chief Technology and Product Officer at Hubble, talked about how they provide real-time corporate performance management (CPM) though high-speed analytics dashboards. You can watch a video recording of this presentation on the conference sessions page linked here. For…
