What is a Modern Data Warehouse? Top 5 Reasons to Modernize Your Data Warehouse Now
We are in a world of connected data. Data comes to us so fast from many different sources and in various formats. In the data space, we have seen three major trends impacting organizations’ data investments and strategies – big data, cloud and analytics intelligence. All these trends converge on data management solution and play important roles in the development of a modern data warehouse for advanced analytics and business intelligence (BI).
A modern data warehouse aggregates and processes all kinds of data including structured, semi-structured and unstructured data on a single platform. Modernizing a data warehouse is all about bringing all types of data from multiple sources together and making it available for advanced analytics to drive business decisions.
Modern Data Warehouse vs. Traditional Data Warehouse
New arising business and technical requirements, changing data characteristics and the exponential growth of data volumes make agility and flexibility the necessary factors for success, which become the major challenges traditional data warehouses struggle to keep up with.
While traditional data warehouses are mainly built for operational reporting and focus on transaction processing, modern data warehouses are structured for analysis and primarily focus on giving in-depth insights generated from data in various formats.
As structured data is no longer the only source to gain insights for business decisions, a data warehouse that can handle any type of data becomes indispensable to take all data in, aggregate it, combine it with other data sets and transform it into useful information and insights.
Integrating existing operational data with semi-structured and unstructured big data is one of the major technical concerns for traditional data warehouses, where modern data warehouses naturally bring together all kinds of data from different sources and abstract the complexities to generate in-depth insights to drive business performance.
Reasons to Modernize Now
There are many concrete and compelling reasons for organizations to embark data warehouse modernization initiatives. With our extensive experience in data warehouse projects with organizations across different industries, here are few most major reasons for businesses to consider a change for their data warehouses:
Inflexible architecture - Current environment is complex and comprises many data silos which results in a lack of native integration across data sources
Scalability challenge - The rapid growth of data volume can impact the performance of data warehouse significantly
Loss of agility - Data coming in from different channels takes days or even weeks to be reflected on dashboards or reports
Lack of insights - Business users are difficult to access useful data and information without a centralized source of actionable insights
Advanced analytics services - The need to perform big data analytics and support new intelligent applications like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Data is Power Only if It is Well Utilized
All in all, data gives you information, and information gives you the power.
A data warehouse is essentially business-driven that BI is continuously shaping the future of data warehouse solution, while customers’ demands keep molding BI processes. To keep up with the changing business landscape, organizations need to make sure they have the capability to intake and process data as fast as it comes in.
With the right way and tools to analyze your data, you are enabled to reveal accurate insights of your customers and industry trends which can guide you to make better business decisions with predictable results, and also help quantify your KPIs and ROI of your data investments for continuous improvements.
Looking for more key considerations, best practices and reasons for modernizing a data warehouse in Azure? Save your spot at our webinar hosted with Microsoft – Reimagine your Data Warehouse Modernization journey. We will share the latest market trend on data journey, advised strategies and several use cases covering different industries to aid your decisions for the important change.
If you are not able to join our webinar, feel free to talk to our team to get advice and have a deeper dive into your data strategies.
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