Making The Move to a Modern Data Warehousing Strategy with your ERP and eCommerce site
Tuesday, May 8, 2018Lauren Macdonald
Finding a suitable means of storing data is a job that IT departments are commonly tasked with at any organization. There is an increasing shift right now within IT departments, where companies are moving from a traditional data warehousing strategy and adopting a modern data warehousing strategy consisting of environments that can be leveraged for analysis, data virtualization, and distributed processing.
This shift stems from four distinct data-related trends that are increasingly important to businesses: data growth, fast query expectations from users, non-relational/unstructured data, and cloud-born data. Modern data warehouses are able to support these trends, whereas traditional data warehouses are not.
What is a Modern Data Warehouse?
A modern data warehouse consists of multiple data platform types, ranging from the traditional relational and multidimensional warehouse to new platforms such as data warehouse appliances, columnar RDBMSs, NoSQL databases, MapReduce tools, and HDFS.
A business commonly uses multiple platforms and each platform collects its own set of data. A modern data warehouse environment can help solve this problem. A unified data warehouse architecture helps IT cope with the growing complexity of their company’s multi-platform environments.
In a modern data warehouse there are four core functions:
- Object Storage
- Table Storage
- Computation and Processing
- Programming languages
“Big Data” today is really “All Data”
In IT today, it’s not so much the size of the data, but the fact that businesses want to incorporate and bring in data from all sources, whether that be traditional data from sources such as a CRM or ERP, or non-relational data from things like Twitter or an eCommerce platform.
To simplify things, IT should ideally manage big data on as few data platforms as possible in order to minimize data movement and avoid data synchronization issues. However, limiting the number of platforms is not always easy, and there will be exceptions to the one platform approach. Most data warehouse and analytic systems are trending toward a multi-platform environment so that diverse data can find the best home based on storage, processing, and budget.
Cloud is key
Clouds are emerging as platforms and architectural components for modern data warehouses. User organizations are adopting a mix of cloud types (both public and private) and freely mixing them with traditional on-premises platforms.
For many, the cloud is an important data management strategy due to its fluid allocation and reapportionment of virtualized system resources, which can immediately enhance the performance and scalability of a modern data warehouse environment.
A modern data warehouse lets you bring together all your data at any scale and get insights through analytical dashboards, operational reports or advanced analytics for your users. This allows a business to transform their data into actionable insights using the best-in-class machine learning tools.
Evaluating your current data warehouse situation
Ask yourself:
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Does our environment quickly handle diverse data sources and a variety of subject areas?
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Can we handle excessive volumes of data?
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Do we support a multiplatform architecture to maximize scalability and performance?
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Have we leveraged new capabilities like data virtualization (cloud services) in addition to data integration?
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Has the organization applied data warehouse automated orchestration for improved agility, consistency and speed through the release life cycle?
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Is our organization running a bimodal business intelligence environment?
If you found yourself answering “no” or “not yet” to the questions above, it may be time to consider moving your business to a modern data warehouse environment. The ability to analyze data and use the insights to make useful recommendations for your company will help you increase profitability, efficiency, agility, and more.
Today at eBridge, all our data (and the data we help our 700+ clients pass back and forth between their ERPs and other platforms), is hosted on world-class Microsoft Azure cloud. This robust modern data warehousing environment provides us with greater analytical capabilities that help us grow our business and provide our clients with better quality service.
We understand big data and make syncing and integration easy