How to overcome the data silo challenge

Organizations that are investing in analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and other data-driven initiatives have exposed a growing challenge: a lack of integration across data sources that is limiting their ability to extract true value from these investments. It’s imperative for IT and business leaders to eliminate these data silos – some of which are operational, and some of which are cultural – to enable better insights for the business.

“The main challenge is how can companies extract data out of every silo and make it more meaningful,” says Manoj Palaniswamy, Principal Architect, Data & AI Services at Kyndryl. “They need to bring it into an environment where it can be used for analytics, reporting, AI, and machine learning.”

Increasingly, organizations are finding the cloud serves as the best environment for integrating, storing, managing, and analyzing large volumes of disparate data types. Cloud hyperscalers such as AWS offer a level of scale and performance that’s impossible to replicate in an on-premises environment. AWS also offers advanced services for analytics and AI/ML that in-house teams may not have the resources or expertise to develop themselves.

“With the cloud and its unlimited compute and storage, it is easier to collect and process structured and unstructured data, query multiple data types, and unlock insights from the data,” says Palaniswamy. Cloud environments can help companies scale for analytics, reporting, and AI/ML, while also reducing complexity – and costs – in IT operations by having a single platform to manage rather than multiple, siloed systems.

Most organizations and their leadership teams understand the value of data and are taking steps to implement a modern data strategy. Some are still at the early stages of the process, defining the data strategy and determining which data or workloads should be moved to the cloud, and which should remain on-premises. Others are further along and are now looking to capture more value from their data projects, or scale initiatives across the business. The most data-mature organizations are running operations from the cloud, in some cases deploying a managed services model for a scalable data infrastructure.

No matter where a company is in their data journey, partnering with a trusted and experienced partner is key. Kyndryl provides end-to-end servicesto consult, modernize, migrate, secure and manage critical business applications and their data. “For the past 30-plus years, we have been designing, building, and managing mission-critical IT environments for Fortune 500 companies,” says Palaniswamy. “Customers trust us.” Kyndryl brings more than 5,000 certified resources and an integrated portfolio of services and technologies across practices such as the cloud, digital workplaces, applications, data, AI security, networking, and edge computing.

Learn more about how Kyndryl and AWS can help companies extract more value from their data systems.