Businesses today are in the midst of a hotly contested race to extract value from data. In fact, an IDC report commissioned by Alteryx finds that 73% of Singapore-based organisations expect analytics spend to outpace other software investments in the months ahead.
With this in mind, connecting data and breaking down silos is critical. Especially, as businesses today find themselves in an age of rapidly growing volumes of data that spring from a variety of sources.
To make full use of this, next-generation data platforms must be part of any future-facing enterprise. However, although a next-generation data platform can provide impetus for differentiation, successfully leveraging its full potential rests on business and IT leaders understanding the true impact of next-gen data platforms.
Why next-generation data platforms cut through complexity
Hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures are here to stay. For enterprises to respond faster to the market and distinguish themselves from the competition, they need applications which offer fast performance and no downtime. In other words, they need to empower this regardless of the infrastructure configuration or scale and performance needs.
Next-generation data platforms use cloud-native architecture to harness the full power of the cloud. Many of these platforms are serverless, enabling continuous availability of services, zero downtime, and higher speeds of data processing.
Not only that, next-generation data platforms can handle structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data. In addition to expanding the data sources that enterprises can access, this also eliminates the need for users to redefine data models just to add new data types and fields to a database.
Using microservices and containers, these data platforms are flexible and allow for easy configuration and reconfiguration. With highly scalable capacity, enterprises do not have to spend on database capacity beyond what is regularly needed.
Besides controlled spending on capacity, next-generation data platforms also have a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) because there is no need for ancillary software and specialised hardware.
Empowering IT decision-making to consistently and rapidly turn data into action
Speed is the name of the game when it comes to deriving insights from data. Next-generation data platforms allow organisations to stay lean and move with greater agility by enabling near real-time insights. Through better processing speeds and the usage of structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data from various sources, the right next-generation data platform simplifies the work of building powerful applications.
Just as important as delivering new products and services faster than the competition, enterprises also have to ensure compliance with data governance and privacy regulations. According to IBM, the cost of a data breach in six ASEAN countries – including Singapore – reached an all-time high, averaging USD 2.87 million in 2022.
With serverless architecture, next-generation data platforms help enterprises comply with regulatory requirements, such as Singapore’s Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA). Businesses can easily replicate their data across multiple data centres while navigating the regulatory landscape adroitly.
The agility of next-generation data platforms enables users to quickly scale up with peak demand, without spending on resources that are left idle and unused most of the time.
Leap into a new era by accelerating the value of your data
As with any new investment into the organisation’s technology stack, careful consideration should be given to the goals and needs of the business before choosing a next-generation data platform. Ideally, business and IT leaders should clarify the organisation’s IT strategy to optimise value.
Aside from public and private clouds, a hybrid cloud model for next-generation data platforms is also viable as it can leverage the best of both the private and public cloud. With the private cloud, businesses can empower compliance, reduce costs and maximise secure access to files that need frequent updating. On the other hand, the public cloud can drive on-demand scalability, dynamic workload management, and support user access from anywhere in the world.
Organisations can also consider a multi-cloud deployment model, which is somewhat similar to a hybrid model. Ultimately, though, the multi-cloud deployment model still offers increased agility and scalability, with the final call up to the business to decide which is best suited to their objectives.
In a world where building applications can often be complex and confusing, facilitating development has enormous benefits for businesses looking to thrive. Through a best-fit next-generation data platform, enterprises gain the extreme power of simplicity that allows rapid development of responsive, consistent and secure applications.
Through its cloud-native architecture and serverless technology, the right next-generation data platform will offer continuous availability and high processing speeds, in addition to scalability and lower TCO.
Through investment in a platform that ties into the wider business goals, enterprises can confidently face the data explosion that is currently taking place. Businesses can then advance with newfound agility, secure in the fact that they are on the path to becoming a data-driven organisation that is ready to respond to market demands and build customer-centric applications.
