Actian Datacast: Is it Keeping IT From Cloud Data Warehouse Nirvana?

Following is the third installment of our in-depth blog series examining the findings of the recent Actian Datacast 2019: Hybrid Data Trends Snapshot. The survey, which polled 303 IT professionals with influence or decision-making ability at their companies of 250+ employees, identified four key trends that were illustrated in the Datacast Infographic. Our weekly blog series explores each of these four trends in greater detail. You can follow along with the blog series by visiting Data at Work, the official Actian blog.

Barriers to Success

In our last two blogs, we looked at how to fully maximize the value of available data and how to leverage the right data for the right decision-making.

This week, we’ll be looking more broadly at the key challenges for IT decision-makers (ITDMs) seeking to adopt cloud data warehouse solutions.

The Actian Datacast found that 57% of ITDMs say they have a lot of data technology, but they don’t believe it’s making any difference to their business. Today’s businesses are no strangers to technology – but is it making a significant impact? Almost three in five ITDMs don’t think so.

Today’s businesses are seeking solutions to effectively and efficiently collect, analyze, manage, and use data. Modern cloud data warehouses offer many enticing benefits for ITDMs. They make it easy to bring analytic powers to data wherever it lives (whether on-prem or in one of the popular cloud platforms), they can handle concurrency at scale, and offer great compute performance and smart, elastic storage utilization.

So what’s preventing businesses from adopting cloud data warehouse solutions?

Cost, speed of deployment, and complexity.

When we dug deeper, we found that 84% of ITDMs would deploy more data warehouse solutions if it took less time and money.

In fact, more than four in five ITDMs say one of the most painful parts of data analytics is how long it takes to deploy.

It’s a complicated path to successful digital transformation and the transition can come with a hefty price tag, but it’s important to keep in mind that the benefits greatly outweigh the costs.  The ability to comply with data regulations of the future depends on being able to put your data where you want (on-prem or in the cloud) and to apply the security protocols and internal controls the laws of the future may require.

Data integration solutions can become an important aspect of regulatory compliance, as they make it possible to transfer, transform, and unify data from non-compliant to compliant states.

In addition, more than 50% of those businesses say data complexity issues, due to siloed applications, are a top barrier to entry for accessing data and gaining effective real-time insights.

To address this, businesses need a more cost-effective and flexible approach designed to contend with a brand’s specific data complexity in order to move faster, more confidently, and with less risk.

Over half of ITDMs say speed of deployment and flexibility are very important to them in choosing a cloud and data warehousing service and/or platform, and 89% say they need more flexibility from their data analytics solutions.

Today’s businesses face a variety of difficult challenges and barriers, but we’re in the midst of a shift towards data warehouse modernization and towards hybrid environments.

We believe this will help resolve some of these problems and allow a compliance-minded enterprise to store their data wherever compliance demands, without sacrificing analytics considerations.

Next week, in our final installment of the Actian Datacast blog series, we will delve deeper into hybrid environments as a fundamental requirement to make this a reality.

About Actian Corporation

Actian makes data easy. We deliver cloud, hybrid, and on-premises data solutions that simplify how people connect, manage, and analyze data. We transform business by enabling customers to make confident, data-driven decisions that accelerate their organization’s growth. Our data platform integrates seamlessly, performs reliably, and delivers at industry-leading speeds.