The Indispensable Need for Data Platforms

The sheer volume of data generated by human endeavour is staggering. According to the latest estimates, 329 million terabytes of data are created each day.

From Information Overload…

The sheer volume of data generated by human endeavour is staggering. According to the latest estimates, 329 million terabytes of data are created each day. As an organisation grows, so does its data and, usually, within the silos and containers of the business units that created it. This unconscious growth assures the data is never accessible to those that might benefit from its aggregation or availability. That said, the data may not even be useful in its current form or may be obsolete and confusing the picture but still consuming valuable storage resources. In the very worst cases, data is just discarded as if it had no inherent value at all. 

…to Information Advantage

Which is a mistake, because data is a strategic asset; extracting meaningful information from it can lead to improved collaboration, decision-making, competitive advantages, and new revenue streams. The opportunity lies in bringing these flourishing but disparate data sources, formats, and storage systems together seamlessly in one consistent and unified strategic view. Creating an efficient system for data management, manipulation and analysis that grows with the organisation and fosters collaboration within it, ensuring data endures beyond current projects and is curated once to be used many times. 

Introducing… the Data Platform

A number of advances have been made in the last twenty or so years that help solve all of these data challenges. The emergence of cloud computing at the turn of the millennium allowed scalable and boundary-less elastic compute, accessible on any device from anywhere. All of those advantages are available today as a service - i.e. without the need to manage the required infrastructure, paying only for what you use, and scaling with user demand. Security is in-built through access management, encryption and being able to choose the geographic location of the employed servers. The democratisation of this capability has acted like a petri dish for the growth of AI, ML and other models and algorithms, creating the tools to analyse (and monetise) the data stored in this new way.

Add these components together with some commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) visualisation software and you have a Data Platform. Once historic data is ported across from business unit silos, and live data sources are plumbed directly in, something transformational occurs; insights become available in real-time. Organisations are then collaborating using the most up-to-date ‘single source of truth’ at the speed of relevance. 

It’s not about having data, it’s about deriving meaning and value from it. 

Twenty years on from the emergence of cloud and these COTS services have never been more cost effective or accessible. At the hands of suitably qualified and experienced data intelligence professionals, we’re now in the realm of ‘platforms of platforms’, where tried and tested technologies can be combined in a ‘tech stack’ with emerging ones, delivering value to end users in a customisable (modular) yet affordable way. 

Data is sometimes referred to as the ‘new oil’, but this belies one of its fundamental advantages; data can be consumed more than once. Getting your strategy right allows you to get your data platform right, so that rather than curating and cleaning the data every time you want to use it, you just do it once and make it available to everyone that needs it. Enduring beyond business structures, roles and careers. 

The sporadic and unpredictable growth of organisations is perfectly acceptable, but how one handles its data must be more deliberate. 


Mission Decisions sits at the convergence between Data and AI, helping organisations leverage Human-Machine Teaming to unlock the true potential of their most valuable assets: People & Data. Find out more about our secure data environment, or if your organisation needs support forming its Data Strategy, contact us at hello@missiondecisions.com.

Previous
Previous

Navigating Connections: The Power of Graph Neural Networks

Next
Next

What is Data Intelligence?