The data management industry is about to witness another generational transformation soon. The shift will be driven by necessity, increasing demands from consumers and regulators. The change is inevitable as the fundamentals are moving from being application-centric to data-centric.

Digital transformation, the movement to cloud and ML-powered customer experiences are causing the shift which will transform the way organizations access and control their enterprise data and serve their customers.

The Reality of Traditional Data Management

With the technology enabling luxury at every port, customers expect the best experience and they possibly don't care about companies' infrastructure or data problems. This makes organizations expect more and more from their technology and IT teams. They want technology to take charge of building great customer experiences while driving to a lower cost structure.

At times, technology teams are not able to enable businesses in this way as they get stuck with legacy architectures. These architectures are not adequate for the explosive data growth happening in current times. The reality is that such inefficiency creates fragmented, incomplete solutions. They take quite a long time to build and deploy with the process and the cost is way to high. And the pressure is not going to slow down anytime sooner. Therefore, to curb the problem it is necessary to provide access to data in the way the business really needs it. They want it well organized, holistic and in real-time.

As of now, the data management industry is trying to curb the issue with big data. Even after making a hefty investment, big data's promise of delivering comprehensive, up-to-date data to organizations in real-time has not been materialized yet.

Definitely, it is not easy to fix the challenges created over 30 years in just 5 years of time span.

The organizations today require the ability to develop experiences based on data that is complete, intelligent and recent. A source is required to organize data the way the business needs it. The organizations need to follow the fundamentals of data centricity which are – organizing, storing, securing, learning and providing real-time access.

Putting Data First

Being the most important asset of an organization, data should be its foremost priority. Applications tend to change but the data collected serves as a lifeblood of any organization. A data-centric infrastructure tends to make life easier for everyone and enables organizations to create and provide great customer experiences.

As data-centric approaches are rising in popularity they also require a cultural shift and infrastructural shift. Every business should prioritize data not the application to achieve success. The shift implies that database vendors must adapt to this new modality and that software vendors will have to commit to new architectures.

As of now, till the shift is taking place at its usual pace, businesses must look out for solutions providing quick, incremental and safe approaches to move toward a data-centric infrastructure. It will allow them to develop more compelling customer experiences and avail perks of greater operational efficiencies.