Data is a company’s single most valuable asset. No matter the industry or size of the company, data should be foundational to every business decision. To access that data affordably and in a way that gives the company a quick return on their investment, a company needs a modern, virtualized data estate.
Unfortunately, many companies are quick to invest in the latest tools and software that are often ill-suited to the business or desired outcomes. If not planned and executed correctly, data estates can become a maze of siloed data that must be extracted and transformed, at very high costs, before the company can produce any business intelligence. This leaves them struggling to realize the value of the data investments they’ve already made.
Meanwhile, organizations fail to realize that the value of their data also degrades over time because it is subject to a cost every time it is moved. Worse, data becomes potentially less relevant with every second, minute and day its delivery is delayed. Data analysis and trend prediction become useless if organizations can’t access those predictions when needed. Organizations only realize value from their data once the data stops being moved and starts being consumed by engineers, data scientists and BI platforms, opening a world of business intelligence and data-driven insights that gives companies a competitive edge in their respective industries.
Make real-time decisions
Organizations continue to see the number of data sources increasing, the types of data diversifying and the rate of data change accelerating. These factors make it more difficult to extract value. As companies try to remain competitive in the digital world, they need to operate more efficiently, understand the rapidly changing desires and needs of their customers and create additional revenue streams. This is ultimately the goal of digital transformation.
To drive quick and secure consumption of data that requires no movement, a company’s best option is to virtualize it. Integrating data virtualization into a modern data estate removes dependencies on data transfer from legacy systems and provides direct access to information, making it the most effective way to empower business leaders to make real-time decisions. Maturing and strengthening data infrastructure in this way not only allows for individual data consumption but also reduces resource strain on capture, storage and utilization of data across their business. A data virtualization-based modern data estate enables companies to stop caring about data types and location and allows them to focus on simple, secure data consumption.
Optimized infrastructure allows data consumption to occur faster and as close to the source as possible, removing the need to constantly move and duplicate data, which was required in the standard ELT (extract, load & transform) model. Companies would copy data from one place and transfer it to another, which often took hours or days and required expensive systems. In more recent years, those costs have decreased, but it can still take a long time to integrate all a company’s data into one accessible location for analytics and business intelligence gathering. Even then, because data is often batched, there is a latency that leads to decision-makers consuming outdated reports.
Stop replicating data; consume it
A modern data estate utilizing data virtualization drives timely consumption of near-real-time data and provides the basis for informed business decisions. A company can integrate, manipulate and normalize data in a temporary virtual space, eliminating the need to repeatedly copy data.
By eliminating the costs of data movement, the latency of data transfer and the lack of direct access to information, a data virtualization-based modern data estate is the way of the future. This optimized data infrastructure gives business users and developers real-time access to data in a secure and governable way, providing real-time data while leaving the IT department in control. By incorporating data virtualization into a data-driven decision-making environment, companies will understand customers’ needs sooner, increase competitive advantage, improve operational efficiencies and ultimately decide what’s best for their company for the long term.
Blueprint’s data virtualization accelerators are the most comprehensive solutions to modernize a data estate on the market today — from features to experience to cost. Built around the customers that struggle with data access, our accelerators solve for high-performance querying over a data lake, multi-cloud data unification, unlocking deeply nested JSON files, turbocharging with GPU query engines, real-time reporting, and so much more.
Whether you need help with large data migrations or democratizing data access and governance, talk with a data implementation and migration specialist.
