Faced with the ever-increasing volumes of data, enterprises are facing the challenge of data fragmentation, and they need to integrate that data to remain competitive.
This was one of the major takeaways from the Informatica Information Potential Summit, held in Johannesburg this week.
Speaking at the event, Piet Loubser, VP for platform product marketing at Informatica, said the nightmare facing organisations today is that IT is more and more becoming additive; and with data volume, velocity and variety always on the rise, data fragmentation has become a big concern for businesses to succeed.
"We live in the information age, yet data threatens to overwhelm us. New types of data, new technologies for managing that data, and new ways to use that information to drive business innovation, are being introduced on a daily basis. But the complexity of accessing and managing all that data is increasing at an exponential pace," he said.
"You can't afford to wait months to implement a new business idea. You can't afford to recode each time you adopt a new approach or tap into a new type of data. And you don't want to be crushed by the combined weight of new technologies and your existing infrastructure."
Loubser noted that in the next 10 years, organisations that need to stay relevant in business will have to embrace a data ecosystem, adding that removing data complexity will also go a long way in organisations deriving value from that data.
"Enterprises need to maximise the potential of data," he said. "Data always needs to be clean, safe and connected. Don't think of data as defined by application boundaries, but as a data ecosystem. Don't think of your infrastructure as static, but as a constantly changing nervous system. Don't think of IT versus the business, but co-operative, where IT is part of the business."
He noted that Informatica recently unveiled a virtual data machine - Vibe - which enables organisations to map once and deploy anywhere in the cloud or on-premises; in databases, applications, middleware, or on a Hadoop cluster; in batch, request/response, or real-time.
Also speaking at the event, Bert Oosterhof, EMEA director of technology at Informatica, said data is growing at a tremendous rate and managing that data will be key to success.
He said to manage this data, organisations must put analytics at the centre of their business, as solving tough business problems depends on data from more than one source.
"Looking at the growth of data and applications, we can't be agile if we deploy the old methods of managing data," said Oosterhof.
He pointed out that the success of any analytics initiative depends on how much impact it brings to the business.
"It's not about collecting raw data. It's about turning it into actionable insights that drive increases in revenue, efficiency and cost savings."
However, he noted it takes a lot of work to refine raw data into something useful. "You have to access and ingest, parse and prepare, discover and profile, transform and cleanse, and extract and deliver data of all types anytime, anywhere. In fact, 80% of a data scientist's or data analyst's time is typically spent preparing the data for analysis. Not in the analysis itself."
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