Data, data everywhere: why you need an enterprise data platform

To support real-time decision-making organisations need real-time data, in huge volumes. This data comes in many formats from multiple sources and multiple devices and may be stored in multiple silos. Individual business units might leverage the power of shadow IT: storing, analysing and gaining insights from their data, beyond visibility of and management by IT departments.

To gain maximum value from all data and ensure its security—whether it resides on premise, in public cloud or private cloud—an organisation requires an overarching system that is able manage these disparate datasets as an integrated whole throughout their entire lifecycle: whatever their sources, wherever they reside and whatever formats they take.

An organisation needs an enterprise data cloud: a new category of analytics and data management tool that helps enterprises derive value from data across any environment and run multi-function analytics on any data, whether it lives on premise, in public or provide cloud and secure and govern it.

MANAGING DATA THOUGHOUT ITS LIFECYCLE

Having access to the full range of data pertaining to customers enables organisations to better understand customer needs and behaviours, develop and deliver more targeted, attractive offerings and generally improve the customer experience, but this data takes many forms, comes from many sources, and typically resides in many different areas.

To deliver a consistent, personalised, context-specific and relevant customer experience, acquire new customers, expand existing relationships and drive loyalty and customer retention an organisation needs a holistic real-time view of individual customers, their preferences and behaviours; a view that is linked across all products, systems, lines of businesses, and interaction channels, and analytics tools that can tap into all this data.

It needs an enterprise data platform that can ingest raw data from its source and manage that data throughout its journey, a platform that incorporates analytic capabilities across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and with the  security and governance policies required for sensitive customer data.

PLANNING AND EXECUTING THE DATA CLOUD MIGRATION

Organisations are increasingly migrating their data to public cloud services to underpin their enterprise data platform. Unless properly executed such a migration can result in spiralling cloud charges, unexpected security and governance risks, and performance issues.

According to Forrester Research the successful migration of a workload from a data centre to the cloud depends on many factors. It recommends staged approach to ensuring a successful migration.

Prepare estimate and check for compatibility

Any cloud migration, however small, should always have a plan that starts with gathering complete information about the applications to be migrated. And the cloud resources required should be estimated as accurately as possible. It’s also important to verify that monitoring and management tools used are compatible with the chosen cloud service.

Measure, adjust and optimise

To accurately assess performance and get an accurate picture at each stage of migration there needs to be a well-thought-out list of measurements with clear goals to meet. It is also important to be realistic about initial performance levels, given the countless unknown factors of migration. Be prepared to do some refactoring in respect to networking, storage, and a host of other resources.

And once a cloud migration is complete there needs to be constant adjustment to maintain an acceptable balance between performance and cost.

Be prepared to backtrack

Sometimes an application will fail to perform adequately in the cloud, leaving only to options: re-architecting or returning it to the data centre. Cost and timescale might dictate the latter approach.

THE CLOUDERA DATA PLATFORM & CDP PUBLIC CLOUD

The key to eliminating data silos and realising the full potential of diverse data sets to drive business value is an enterprise data cloud: a big data platform that enables control and management of large data volumes spread across multiple environments (edge, private cloud, and multiple public clouds) throughout the full lifecycle of that data.

The Cloudera Cloud Data Platform (CDP) is the first such enterprise data cloud. It eliminates data silos, unifying data across hybrid and multi-cloud environments into a single data platform. It supports data-driven decisions and predictive actions by seamlessly connecting data across a fragmented IT landscape, provides security and governance of data throughout its entire data lifecycle, and makes that data available for predictive insights and guided decision-making. It provides cost efficiency and performance at scale for all workloads.

In runs on any infrastructure—from on-premises private cloud to multiple public clouds, or in hybrid cloud combinations.

Its highly scalable, real-time streaming analytics engine that ingests, curates, and analyses data for key insights and immediate actionable intelligence.

CDP has a real-time, scalable database that creates a unified platform embracing traditional structured data, unstructured and semi-structured data.

The Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) offers a three-step approach that reduces the complexities of creating an enterprise data cloud.

• Step 1—Evaluate Clusters and Workloads: CDP Upgrade Advisor is a self-service tool that evaluates your legacy assets to recommend upgrade paths, highlight risks, and explain why.
• Step 2—Enable Migration Activities: CDP Workload Manager and CDP Replication Manage automate replication or migration of data and workloads to the public cloud.
• Step 3—Launch Production Workloads: Seamlessly extend to production, leveraging the unified data experience of CDP. This strategic and progressive plan lets you benefit and learn from small wins and expand into more sophisticated and value driven use cases.

Cloud Computing