Cloud Data Lakes Get Easier to Orchestrate and Data Democratization Swells

By Prat Moghe, CEO of Cazena

Businesses across industries now drawing up their 2021 roadmaps will soon find they can fit in much more progress than they might initially anticipate around their data lake, analytics, and ML/AI-fueled goals. Expect 2021 to be defined by more opportunities for acceleration and orchestration simplicity around cloud data lake implementations, which will in turn yield analytical insights that are both more powerful and more broadly accessible within organizations:

1) More streamlined cloud data lake orchestration makes it easier to put information at the fingertips of all those who need it.

In 2021, enterprises will accelerate their data modernization and digital transformation efforts by streamlining the processes that refine vast stores of data into actionable insights. Those still hampered by cumbersome data integrations requiring technical engineering efforts to fulfill data requests will recognize - and address - the competitive limitations that latency imposes. Self-service data and analytics capabilities will be a welcome victory on this front, enabling the data scientists, analysts, product teams, and other technical and business professionals to much more quickly and easily access the data, analytics, and machine learning capabilities they need to do their jobs.

Providing more democratized self-service access in 2021 speaks to the heart of modernized data management and orchestration. Organizations will adopt practices to listen to their front-line data users and ensure their needs are met. Eliminating the requisite for developer or operations team involvement in data retrieval - and ensuring that data is available to anyone who needs it using their own familiar tools - will unlock the full potential of data lake technology for many more businesses throughout the coming year. It will also usher in valuable new efficiencies, and spur the pace of analysis and innovation. The competitive risks of not making progress on this front have become too big to ignore.

2) SaaS platforms will bring new speed and simplicity to cloud migrations and cloud data lake implementations.

The still-common (and still-difficult) DIY approach to achieving cloud migrations and creating data lakes on those clouds will be increasingly replaced in 2021 by SaaS platforms offering more turnkey simplicity. The strategy shift will turn around these complex infrastructural transformations significantly faster. For example, many enterprises will see the time required to deploy a production cloud data lake reduced from months down to minutes.

In past years many organizations took incremental steps toward modernization and saw projects stall out, unable to produce real benefits quickly enough. In 2021, expect enterprises that once balked at 9-12-month long migration calendars to jump at the opportunity to introduce full cloud data lake capabilities at a pace that's nearly instantaneous by comparison.

3) Enterprises will finish the debate between data lakes and data warehouses - by embracing both.

The battle between data lakes and data warehouses is coming to a harmonious end in 2021, as enterprises discover that declaring peace between the technologies can enable more rapid modernization and superior outcomes. Businesses will continue to leverage data warehouses to fulfill needs around business intelligence and reporting. In tandem, they'll utilize modern cloud data lakes as a critical middle layer that can optimize data flow to facilitate the full range of data ingestion, storage, processing, and analytics needs.

To this end in 2021, enterprises will also tap modern cloud data lakes to enable AI and ML capabilities that are decisively more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective than have previously been available. Importantly, these cloud data lakes will enable enterprises to modernize without altering their business processes. Users may continuously adopt new AI/ML tools, or data ingestion techniques may shift (for example, from batch to real-time streaming), while business processes remain intact. Backed by these technologies, enterprises will be able to accelerate the pace at which they achieve digital transformation, and reap the benefits of large data projects much more rapidly.

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About the Author

Prat Moghe is the CEO of Cazena, which provides instant cloud data lakes for enterprises. Prat is an entrepreneur with more than 18 years of experience inventing next-generation data services and building teams in the technology sector. As senior vice president of strategy, products and marketing at IBM Netezza, he led a worldwide 400-person team that launched the latest Netezza data warehouse appliance, which became a market leader in price and performance, as well as IBM's first big data appliance.