Getting the data insights you need to rapidly make effective decisions

Data to hit 175 zetta bytes by 2025

Data continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, in fact IDC predicts that worldwide data will hit 175 zettabytes by 2025. There are many external sources and industry pundits predicting continued exponential data growth over the next few years, but overall, there is broad agreement that the size of the digital universe will double every two years at least. This represents a 50-fold growth from 2010 to 2020.

As data continues to grow so this presents challenges for organisations in terms of harnessing data insights and obtaining meaningful analytics that enable better informed business decisions. Success in today’s ‘always-on’ economy depends on the ability of the organisation to drive insights at high speed from vast quantities of data. Enterprises need to empower the business with accurate, real-time information. In fact, organisations that see their data and analytics strategy as a priority and a concern rather than an afterthought will remain competitive in their industry. Whereas those that don’t prioritise data, probably won’t be around in the long term.

Cost efficient and effective data management and analysis

But when your valuable data is spread across numerous systems, in such volumes and contained both on-premises and in the cloud, how do you effectively access, manage and analyse all this data? And more importantly, how do you do that in a cost-effective and efficient way? Additionally, how can you trust the data, if you have multiple sources and no single version of the truth?

Traditionally organisations have turned to data warehousing to organise their data streams and get that critical and important trend information and insights.  In fact, one of the main benefits of a warehouse is the ability to process large amounts of historical data over time, consolidating this information from many sources to enable the organisation to make the right business decisions.

But data volumes have grown so much in the last ten years, many organisations are struggling to keep up and are finding it difficult to run meaningful jobs from their data warehousing project. As a result, data warehouse projects have a bad reputation and are notorious for delays, budget overruns, functional creep and even outright failure. Additionally, nowadays the sheer scope of a data warehouse project means that it is likely to be beyond the internal competence of employees within most organisations.

How can a parallelised data warehousing system help?

This is where parallelised data warehousing systems can really help as they are simple to administer and maintain and they have been purpose built to tackle this very problem. The processing of large amounts of data is typical for data warehouse environments. However, depending on the available hardware resources, sooner or later the point is reached where a job cannot be managed on a single processor or represented by a single process anymore. The reasons for this are typically that time requirements demand the use of multiple processors. Systems resources such as memory, disk space, temporary tablespace, rollback segments, etc. are often limited and recurrent errors require the repetition of the process.

Here at Northdoor our data warehousing solution simplifies data management and analysis, giving users quick and easy access to tools for predictive and prescriptive analysis while accelerating and automating pipelines so users can focus on insight, not data preparation. We also have a tool that enables easy migration from the data warehouse to the target system. This is a comparison tool that tests and intelligently matches data to again help speed up the process. This is important because if you are migrating from one system to another the key challenge is always around making sure that the differences between the data structure and the data from the source to the target can easily be identified, understood, and where necessary, rectified or accepted and documented.

Crunching through 600 million records

For example, one of our customers who provides employee and customer engagement services such as recognition incentives and employee wellbeing solutions, has a huge consumer database.  It was running jobs against every single one of its brands in the portfolio and these were taking far too long. Working with Northdoor, together we loaded 600 million records into our system and ran the same jobs 45x faster.  This quickly gave various teams the critical business information they needed, such as how many products were being sold and in which locations, where they were shipping products to and distribution areas, and so much more. This enabled the organisation to better understand how much they had sold through to where they needed to use different warehouses – all on a global basis

Another example is a global consumer goods company that was working from cumbersome business intelligence reports that were dying at the 30-minute mark, as they took up too much compute time. We managed to run these reports in less than 15 minutes, in fact for three of the five reports, we completed these in less than 90 seconds.

Leveraging data insights to support commercial growth

Clearly data is only set to continue to grow. The velocity of data is growing too, with experts saying we create about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. This data is the key to transforming business and delivering competitive advantage.

However, there are still a lot of companies that are not leveraging their data properly and gaining the insights they need to develop and grow their business. In fact, the inability to understand and manage data is one of the key challenges that is holding many companies back. Don’t let that be your organisation!

Get in touch today to book an initial consultation with one of our experts