Modernize Your Data Stack to Thrive in Uncertain Times

Economic instability and uncertainty are the leading causes for technology budget decreases, according to the IDG/Foundry 2022 annual State of the CIO survey. Despite a desire to cut budgets, data remains the key factor to a business succeeding – especially during economic uncertainty. According to the Harvard Business Review, data-driven companies have better financial performance, are more likely to survive, and are more innovative.^[1]

So how do companies find this balance and create a cost-effective data stack that can deliver real value to their business? A new survey from Databricks, Fivetran, and Foundry that surveyed 400-plus senior IT decision-makers in data analytics/AI roles at large global companies, finds that 96% of respondents report negative business effects due to integration challenges. However, many IT and business leaders are discovering that modernizing their data stack overcomes those integration hurdles, providing the basis for a unified and cost-effective data architecture.

Building a performant & cost-effective data stack 

The Databricks, Fivetran, and Foundry report points the way for four investment priorities for data leaders: 

1. Automated data movement. A data pipeline is critical to the modern data infrastructure. Data pipelines ingest and move data from popular enterprise SaaS applications, and operational and analytic workloads to cloud-based destinations like data lakehouses. As the volume, variety and velocity of data grow, businesses need fully managed, secure and scalable data pipelines that can automatically adapt as schemas and APIs change while continuously delivering high-quality, fresh data. Modernizing analytic environments with an automated data movement solution reduces operational risk, ensures high performance, and simplifies ongoing management of data integration. 

2. A single system of insight. A data lakehouse incorporates integration tools that automate ELT to enable data movement to a central location in near real time. By combining both structured and unstructured data and eliminating separate silos, a single system of insight like the data lakehouse enables data teams to handle all data types and workloads. This unified approach of the data lakehouse dramatically simplifies the data architecture and combines the best features of a data warehouse and a data lake. This enables improved data management, security, and governance in a single data architecture to increase efficiency and innovation. Last, it supports all major data and AI workloads making data more accessible for decision-making.

A unified data architecture results in a data-driven organization that gains both BI, analytics and AI/ML insights at speeds comparable to those of a data warehouse, an important differentiator for tomorrow’s winning companies. 

3. Designed for AI/ML from the ground up. AI/ML is gaining momentum, as more than 80% of organizations are using or exploring the use of (AI) to stay competitive. “AI remains a foundational investment in digital transformation projects and programs,” says Carl W. Olofson, research vice president with IDC, who predicts worldwide AI spending will exceed $221B by 2025.^[2] Despite that commitment, becoming a data-driven company fueled by BI analytics and AI insights is proving to be beyond the reach of many organizations that find themselves stymied by integration and complexity challenges. The data lakehouse solves this by providing a single solution for all major data workloads from streaming analytics to BI, data science, and AI. It empowers data science and machine learning teams to access, prepare and explore data at scale.

4. Solving the data quality issue. Data quality tools(59%) stand out as the most important technology to modernize the data stack, according to IT leaders in the survey. Why is data quality so important? Traditionally, business intelligence (BI) systems enabled queries of structured data in data warehouses for insights. Data lakes, meanwhile, contained unstructured data that was retained for the purposes of AI and Machine Learning (ML). However, maintaining siloed systems, or attempting to integrate them through complex workarounds, is difficult and costly. In a data lakehouse, metadata layers on top of open file formats increase data quality, while query engine advances speed and performance. This serves the needs of both BI analytics and AI/ML workloads in order to assure the accuracy, reliability, relevance, completeness, and consistency of data. 

According to the Databricks, Fivetran, and Foundry report, nearly two-thirds of IT leaders are using a data lakehouse, and more than four out of five say they’re likely to consider implementing one. At a moment when cost pressure is calling into question open-ended investments in data warehouses and data lakes, savvy IT leaders are responding as they place a high priority on modernizing their data stack. 

Download the full report to discover exclusive insights from IT leaders into their data pain points, how theyplan to address them, and what roles they expect cloud and data lakehouses to play in their data stack modernization.

^[1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/why-data-driven-customers-are-future-competitive-strategy

^[2]  Source: IDC’s Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Spending Guide, Feb V1 2022.