How the cloud may finally solve the data silo problem

Not loving your data?

You’re not alone.

Accessing corporate and external data to gain insight and get ahead is critical—but it isn’t easy. One source claims 90 percent of digital information is unstructured and locked in siloed repositories, meaning departments can only see and perform analysis on their own limited data sets And this means they don’t get a complete picture of the business.

Seriously—90 percent?

Of course, there are data stars and digital-native companies that don’t face this challenge. But most of us (61 percent, says a recent CMS Wire article) must access at least four systems for insight. And 15 percent of us are juggling 11 or more systems to stay fully informed!

Because we have to access data from these disparate systems, we become like butterflies on flowers, spending more time flitting from system to system than we spend getting down into some valuable deep thought.

What’s at stake here? How is non-integrated, non-scalable data access hurting our success?

Database Trends and Applications tells us that poor data quality hurts productivity by up to 20 percent and prevents 40 percent of business initiatives from achieving targets. And a Gartner survey found that poor data quality costs businesses $15 million every year.

So how do we climb out of this mess and find a way to love our data again?

Centralized, integrated data access and sharing is the holy grail of data management. And more and more, organizations are closing server rooms and moving to the cloud in the hope that this will be the answer. They can quickly find, however, that cloud services on their own don’t necessarily offer the flexibility or cost control they need. But when a cloud-native analytics platform takes the best of cloud services, combines them with open source technologies and the automation of processes like ETL, you can finally realize the full value of your data: scalability, fast access and insight for every role using any BI tool.

Pythian’s scalable cloud-native Enterprise Data Platform can help you get better, more complete insights by taking your data headaches away and giving you an across-the-board view into:

• customer experience and marketing
• financial performance
• product strategy
• data science and machine learning
• executive vision
• really, anything you need to know to kick the competition’s derriere.

Getting all your data into one place, cleaned, unified and prepped for your use cases sounds like a dream, right? It’s not.

I repeat: this is not a dream.

Read more about our Enterprise Data Platform, or to get started on a plan to take your data to the cloud, sign up for our cloud analytics readiness assessment workshop.

Download the infographic as a pdf.