How a true hybrid platform can enhance decision making and growth
As more organizations across all sectors increasingly use data and technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to advance their business goals, many are discovering that their legacy infrastructure is not up to the task. Silos of data and complex solutions can lead to delays, increased operational costs, and risks to functionality, compliance, and security.
Faced with such challenges, some organizations are turning to hybrid solutions that combine cloud and on-premises environments. But these platforms may not solve the problem if data cannot move smoothly and quickly between environments, or if data workloads must remain on their existing infrastructure due to compliance or governance requirements.
Additionally, security, compliance, and governance settings and regulations may vary, requiring additional steps to ensure data is clean, complete, and secure. This can constrain limited IT resources and cause delays. These solutions may also not be designed to handle the volume and complexity of data required for rigorous analyzes and AI model development.
The most effective approach is a “true hybrid” platform: one that connects data workloads across environments so that enterprise data — and the AI and analytics fueled by the data — can move easily and operate securely. Results include increased operational efficiency, expanded computing power, improved performance, and unlocked scalability and growth opportunities.
Data-enabled business environment
Data availability and quality are the biggest challenges to achieving AI at scale, according to More than a third of IT leaders In response to one recent survey. More than half Governance and compliance are also a barrier to achieving comprehensive data governance, said one of these participants.
True Hybrid supports consistent functionality and security across all environments without manual intervention. True hybrid capabilities, based on a single platform, can quickly, securely, and reliably manage data load, data management, and compute requirements for analytics and AI across cloud and on-premises environments.
“True Hybrid delivers more than just deploying to multiple infrastructures separately – it enables data, analytics and AI to move seamlessly between all, to handle change and always be able to deliver insights and value in the most optimal way,” says Andrew Prost. Industry Analyst, Blue Badge Insights. “To achieve this, organizations need a flexible and scalable data architecture that they can grow with.”
A true hybrid includes several basic elements:
• Distributed cloud model. In this architecture, cloud services spread across different data centers, clouds, or edge computing locations act as a single platform. This allows centralized control of operations and updates even when cloud services are in different locations.
• Portable and interoperable data services. The platform should allow users to easily transfer data and workloads between different systems. These systems must be able to communicate and exchange seamlessly and automatically at every stage of the data lifecycle, including ingestion, transformation, storage, and machine learning.
• Consistent data security, compliance, and governance. A unified, centralized platform allows organizations to apply and enforce a single set of policies and access controls across all environments.
These items bring a host of advantages. Eliminating the need to manage multiple security, compliance, and governance configurations and systems streamlines operations, relieves pressure on internal resources, lowers IT costs, and reduces the risk of manual errors.
This is especially critical as companies grow. A global consumer credit company found itself trying to manage more than 200 data warehouses for tens of billions of transactions each month, creating technical hurdles, increased expenses, and varying data restrictions on the part of local governments. These obstacles prevented its growth and expansion into new markets.
After shifting its approach to a true hybrid model, the company reduced operational and employee training challenges, Reduced operating expenses by approximately $200,000 per month. With few barriers to expansion into new international markets, the company is seeing revenue growth of approximately 30%.
While true hybrid platforms improve existing processes, they are also essential to support data-driven decision-making and innovation vital to operating in an increasingly fast-paced global marketplace.
IQVIA, a company providing advanced analytics, technology and research services to the life sciences industry, needed to quickly analyze data to gain insights: a serious challenge for its previous platform, with data spread across 250 warehouses.
Adopting a true hybrid strategy has helped the company eliminate long wait times to copy and move its data from one isolated location to another. Improve performance Enabling faster analysis of larger data sets, helping IQVIA accelerate clinical drug trials and development so it can bring potentially life-changing medicines to market more quickly and efficiently.
True hybridization: the way forward
A true hybrid platform offers benefits beyond simply making business operations more efficient and cost-effective. By eliminating siled data challenges, enhancing performance, and supporting scalability, a true hybrid approach is an essential approach for organizations seeking to optimize their data for more accurate planning and powerful data-driven insights that drive business innovation and growth.
Find out how close your organization is to them Achieving true hybridity Using your existing data and analytics approach.