Data Challenges
Are you ready to face your data deamons?
The cloud has become the most convenient solution to store data. It is cost effective, flexible, and allows for more innovation with data.
Cost effective: By outsourcing the storage of data, organizations can reduce the expenses of internal resources to manage and store data. The cloud provider market is quite competitive. This allows organizations to find good solutions at an affordable price.
Flexible: The cloud service providers allow flexibility in up- and downscaling the storage plans and capacity. It is possible to adapt and include services with a simple check, like disaster recovery, security features, automation features, synchronization…. Of course, keep an eye on the price!
Innovation: Nowadays almost all the innovation in data happens in the cloud. For instance: the rise of AI and Machine Learning is a consequence of the increase in computational power, which is made possible through cloud storage flexibility and capacity. More and more technology providers are going for cloud first in their future developments.
Most organizations understand that moving to the cloud can be powerful. But many organizations are reluctant or hesitant.
There are often 2 main reasons: either because the business case is not yet clear or because they see some hurdles with the move to the cloud (typically privacy and security).
While postponing a move to the cloud, we see organizations’ position in the market weakening compared to organizations that have already taken the step. The gap between them widens, as the former need to still invest in a migration, while the latter are going fully fledged for innovation and discovering new business insights.
To facilitate migrating to the cloud, an assessment of the databases and application landscape can highlight the risks, determine the right scope, timeline and priorities. The business case will be made clear in terms of investment needs versus cost savings, in a more granular manner.
As a result, a migration plan is created. The migration is ideally done iteratively. It could be that certain parts of the current landscape are not migrated as the ROI is not there, or that privacy or security risks cannot be addressed sufficiently. Although cloud storage providers are taking more and more technical measures to address these.
Ideally, the migration is not just an ‘as is’ migration. It is optimal to determine a ‘to be’ situation that covers future needs as well as current needs. And to remove, consolidate or archive parts that no longer bring any current or future value.
A modern data platform, with or without a migration, will allow the organization to really take advantage of the cloud in terms of costs, flexibility and innovation. It can make use of (near) real-time components in the architecture, wherever they are relevant, like for Iot devices, sensors or video streaming.
Such a modern data platform with a layered architecture is much more performant and can fulfill the current and future (+/- 5 years) data needs. It is often cloud native, integrates data from multiple systems, and is cost efficient to setup and maintain. The ability from a modern data platform to support more advanced analytics is equally as attractive as the speed and efficiency gained.
Please contact our experts to discuss and solve your data challenges.
The customer Fluxys is Belgium’s independent operator of the high-pressure natural gas transmission network, the natural gas storage infrastructure in Loenhout and the liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Zeebrugge.
In order to get a better grip on the current IT landscape, Sparkle and a giant retail company worked together to create an Enterprise Architecture practice.
By implementing a modern data platform VAR reduced manual work, obtained better insights, phased out legacy software and discovered possibilities to monetize data.
