In a post-Covid-19 era, enterprises need to leverage their valuable data assets to offer more value to the customers and empower the business to be future-ready. To thrive in this highly competitive business world, enterprises need to utilize the power trapped in their datacenters by building smart analytics on it. However, many analytics solutions create and rely on disparate data silos, increasing the complexity for IT professionals, and delaying time to generate data-driven insights for business professionals. Hence, enterprises need a well-architected cloud data platform that automates many essential tasks from – how the data is stored and processed to transaction management, security, governance and metadata management.
Let us first begin by understanding what a Cloud Data Platform is?
A cloud data platform is organizations’ counterpart in delivering value and responding to the concrete needs of their data-driven processes. It is an integrated technology solution that allows data located in databases to be governed, accessed, and delivered to users, data applications, or other technologies for strategic business purposes. Such platforms are connected directly to databases to ensure that employees get access to the right data at the right time, without delays in processing a volume of data or data requests.
So, why do enterprises need a Cloud Data Platform?
A Cloud Data Platform Integrates – A cloud data platform brings disparate data siloes together on a single platform thereby facilitating interoperability, allowing companies to plug in their favorite (open-source) tools. Some cloud data platforms come with a fully operational built-in infrastructure and a complete toolchain covering all data-related processes starting with harvesting the data and transforming it in data pipes, all the way to reporting and visualizing.
It Unifies Data – Since a cloud data platform provides a data hub to compile the data from different sources, it unifies data on to a single platform. These sources include streaming data from IoT data routers, collecting data from web sources, FTP connections, and even files. The data is then cleaned in data pipes, consolidated, and transformed to run analytics and deliver business-critical insights.
It Ensures Secure Collaboration across all data – As enterprises generate huge volume of data, they need to ensure that their employees get the flexibly to seamlessly collaborate on mission-critical projects. Unfortunately, legacy data systems create multiple data silos, fostering inconsistent administrative procedures. These legacy systems do not support integration and collaboration and a plethora of protocols need to be created to make data available across organization. A cloud data platform provides secure data sharing, unlike traditional systems. This secure data sharing doesn’t require data copy or movement and eliminates the need for costly and cumbersome processes or development and maintenance of APIs. It also allows the creation of centrally managed data exchanges that act as data hubs and allow for secure data sharing at scale.
It Simplifies and Accelerates Decision Making- Most importantly, a cloud data platform is all about user comfort. It offers a fully seamless, one-touch data journey. A collaborative and modern architecture allows enterprises to unite internal business units and collaborate with partners and customers by securely sharing the data in real-time, without worrying about managing the infrastructure. This allows organizations to gain unlimited scale, performance, concurrency, and deliver limitless amounts of computing power and analytical capabilities, which enables to take faster and well-informed decisions.
