How to build a cloud-based Modern-Data-Platform?
What is a cloud-based Modern Data Platform (MDP)?
Briefly, a cloud-based Modern Data Platform (MDP) is a technology solution which can process a multitude of data sources for a business to offer transformative insights. By consolidating the necessarydata analyticstechnologies, your Modern Data Platform will ingest raw data of varied speed and variety, refine, store, and transform it into visuals, reports and analytics. By using accurate and incisive data transformation, your business is enabled for better results.
How does MDP function?
Modern Data Platforms (MDPs) combine complementary technologies to create a unified system to:
By offering a 360-degree view of all your business activities, you gain a great advantage over other businesses. The data made available can streamline your business to scale up and increase operational efficiency.
Building a Modern Data Platform
Building a Modern Data Platform is solely reliant on your unique business requirements. It is often beneficial to avail the advisory services of specialists in this area since, it is important to build right the first time. Today several businesses are stuck with both cloud-based and on-premises versions of data platforms creating huge overheads for the businesses.
Few key considerations:
- Having a clear vision of what applications to migrate to cloud.
- Preparing the in-house staff early on cloud-native tools.
- Outlining/Obtaining necessary regulatory clearances.
- Selecting the right partners for advisory and build.
- Post-migration service strategy.
Here are the essential components of the Modern Data Platform:
BI & Analytics
Working backward, the final layer in a MDP performs data analysis, reports, dashboards, and visualization. This layer provides your analysts and users with high-quality information related to your enterprise’s activities, allowing optimal, data-driven decisions to be made by your executives. Modern tools in this space include AWS-QuickSight, Microsoft-PowerBI, and Google-Looker (among others) and provide interfaces for ad-hoc analysis as well as enterprise-class business intelligence reporting.
Key considerations here are the speed/performance to the end consumer and giving power to the business users with self-service and authoring capabilities along with fixed reporting. Today the modern tools provide rich visualizations and interactive dashboard capabilities. Collaboration workspace environment in reports development has become a benchmark for continuous integration and delivery.
Cloud Data Warehouse
Cloud data warehouses are cloud-native MPP (massively parallel processing) OLAP databases specifically designed for easy scalability. Often column-oriented for optimized I/O operations, these databases offer near-limitless compute and storage capabilities. Modern cloud-data warehouses include Amazon Redshift, Azure Power BI, Google Big Query, and Snowflake.
Data Integration and Transformation
To create an MDP, your business needs to integrate a wide variety of relational, structured, and semi-structured data sources. These data sources need to be manipulated and transformed into a unified format that feeds downstream analytics and visualizations. A cloud-native data transformation solution allows high-speed connections between your enterprise and other cloud-based data sources. This is the key component of your Modern Data Platform which would enable near real-time reporting or historical reporting in batch mode. There are several options in this space hence choosing the right processing component for the requirement is a good step ahead.
ITTStar has a unique no-code solution which can help you extract data from your on-premises or cloud-based applications that move data into a cloud data warehouse, and then transform it into the unified formats necessary for your BI and analytics tools.
Data Security
Last but not least, today businesses face a host of challenges including security breaches, loss of sensitive data, and malware propagation. Hence, it is important to have an end-to-end data security strategy on Modern Data Platform either your data is at rest or in motion.
Cloud-based storage services provide out-of-the-box encryption at rest and a key management system enables secure authentication between services and we have SSL/TSL protocols for data in transit. The data security topic is so important and worth a separate blog topic to cover in detail.
Conclusion
By executing data-driven decisions, organizations are scaling up faster than ever before. Using AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud technologies, the business ecosystem is evolving with cloud architecture. Based on your data requirements and unique business objectives, you can begin your journey towards maximized efficiency and minimal human intervention. Your data analytics can power up your business intelligence with timely and result-oriented decisions. You benefit by saving costs, time and effort in synthesizing crucial data that could transform your business into a key market player.
If you are starting on Modern Data Platform for the first time, you need the right advice. AtITTStarwe strive to be that right partner for our esteemed client base in the US and Europe. We have a team of Solution Architects, Data Engineering, BI reporting and Data Science specialists for a mind share session. We take pride in powering up businesses with superior business intelligence.