Do You Have the Data Agility Your Business Needs?

data is the new battleground. For companies, the situation is clear – their future depends on how quickly and efficiently they can turn data into accurate insights. This challenge has put immense pressure on CIOs to not only manage ever-growing data volumes, sources, and types, but to also support more and more data users as well as new and increasingly complex use cases.

Fortunately, CIOs can look for support in their plight from unprecedented levels of technological innovation. New cloud platforms, new databases like Apache Hadoop, and real-time data processing are just some of the modern data capabilities at their disposal. However, innovation is occurring so quickly and changes are so profound that it is impossible for most companies to keep pace, let alone leverage those factors for a competitive advantage.

Its clear that data infrastructures today can’t be static if they are to keep pace with the data requirements of the business.  Today’s competitive environment requires adaptive and scalable infrastructures able to solve today’s challenges and address tomorrow’s needs; after all, the speed with which you process and analyze data may be the difference between winning and losing the next customer. This is significantly more important today than 10 or 15 years ago since companies used to make a strategic database choice once and keep running it for a decade or two.  Now we see companies updating their data platform choices far more frequently to keep up.

If companies are to thrive in a data-driven economy, they can’t afford to be handcuffed to ‘old’ technologies; they need the flexibility and agility to move at a moment’s notice to the latest market innovations. However, it’s not enough for companies to simply be technology agnostic; they also need to be in a position to re-use data projects, transformations, and routines as they move between platforms and technologies.