Understanding the Need for Effective Data Strategy for Better Business.

Data and cloud have become two ubiquitous terms in the business world. While data forms a crucial pipeline in digital empowerment, bringing innovation and growth for an enterprise, cloud strategies provide a platform to deliver computation and act as a storage hub for them. Cloud also enables fast-responding, user-friendly applications with greater agility. However, despite the knowledge of how important the cloud is, businesses often do not pay much attention to designing a cloud-powered data architecture. Nor do they have an idea about the risks that poor cloud and data management can cause, especially the security challenges.

There are other significant challenges that businesses leveraging data-oriented policies may counter. These can be about data visibility, managing, monitoring, and maintaining a multi-cloud environment. The management challenges could be regarding how one stores and cost-effectively replicates data, what steps need to be taken to prevent data silos. Additionally, there are regulation framework issues, too, with new GDPR policy and others coming down the circuit.

Businesses with a remit to move to the cloud may find these issues demanding and chaotic. But having a clear data strategy for a multi-cloud world may help them gain most of the cloud features. Without it, leaders may find it difficult in managing, accessing, securing, governing, and deriving insight from data, which is quite similar to what early cloud adopters have experienced. Therefore, it is vital to have a data strategy that comprises of a multi-step framework, a well-designed strategy process, and a definitive plan of action. Having a well-planned data strategy, companies can support business objectives like increasing revenues, refining customer experience, reducing risks, and driving profitability by giving business units and users access to relevant data so they can quickly gain the insight they need.

Some key focus points businesses can include in their data strategy plan are:

• Open data: Democratizing data empowers employees in every department to have access to customized, up-to-date reporting on key business metrics relevant to their job, which empowers them and involves them more in the business. This also minimizes the possibilities of creating a data silo.

• Right Deployment model: An Enterprise Data Cloud, like Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), gives organizations the flexibility and agility to deploy their data and analytics as guided by their Enterprise Data Strategy in the best way possible. CDP provides the flexibility to deploy workloads where needed while allowing for data and associated security and governance policies to move as business requirements change. This resilience lets organizations take full advantage of the cloud as it was always intended: as the flexible, agile, and scalable catalyst to distill valuable insight from data.

• Continuous integration/continuous delivery: The cloud should have the ability to manage and exercise control over services running on it. Along with that, the company's database should handle the data scaling and monitoring, adding shards, rebalancing, or failover in the significant event. By integrating database and cloud-native solution, businesses can relieve themselves from the operational burden of monitoring the database and the platform, and spend more time developing and deploying quality software.

As companies move into forays of the cloud environment, they must analyze and comprehend the risks involved. Improper management can lead to heavy losses both financially and in customer market status. While data is a boon, business leaders must realize it is growing exponentially and therefore have a robust plan to handle such situations.