Modern data platforms are built to serve a variety of purposes, from securing sensitive corporate data assets to answering the questions of technically unsophisticated users. The enterprise data platform will be built on a variety of database technologies spanning the edge, the cloud and the data center, streaming sources like Kafka, as well as non-database technologies like SaaS applications and social media applications. At Data Summit Connect 2021, Emma McGrattan, SVP, Actian, outlined the key traits of a winning modern data architecture.
According to McGrattan, the following are the key five tenets of a successful enterprise data architecture:
#1 Encompasses all data types and sources
Getting access to all data types, including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, and all sources across channels is critically important for many company initiatives such as Customer 360, compliance with GDPR and other regulations, KYC protocols, and others, said McGrattan.
#2 Elasticity
Cloud provides clear advantages in elasticity, said McGrattan, noting that businesses want to be able scale up and down their usage to address as needs and demands change and some want this done automatically, while others want an administrator to approve new capacity.
#3 Delivers value on day-one
Today, many organizations believe a platform should start delivering value on day one, and they should be able to measure value and see that value in the first couple of days. The tolerance for long-running projects is disappearing. Organizations also want an environment that meets their business needs, and to not have to pay for something that's going to accommodate their rare peak workloads all the time. Some companies are choosing to have a tiered data strategy, for example, said McGrattan, in which they keep their corporate crown jewels on a database appliance but move their second-tier applications to the cloud to free up valuable space rather than purchasing more appliances which will take time to become fully useful, said McGrattan.
#5 Resiliency
As you build out a data platform, you've got to make sure that you don't have any single points of failure, said McGrattan. It has to be built to be resilient and with layers of redundancy so that you can guarantee your 24x7 business operations. And if a component were to fail for whatever reason, there must be automatic failover to a backup so that it the process is invisible to users.
McGrattan’s session was titled “Five Key Traits of a Winning Modern Data Architecture.”
More information about Data Summit Connect 2021 is available here.
Replays of all Data Summit Connect 2021 sessions will be available to registered attendees for a limited time and many presenters are making their slide decks available as well.