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Scenario 1: The Overnight Digital Transformation

Judy Ko
By Posted in Data Integration April 1, 2020

Doing Business with Steady Demand and Radical Delivery Disruptions

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You’re experiencing roughly the same level of demand, but have had to make significant operational changes. From shifting to a remote workforce to implementing a digital transformation strategy overnight, data plays a key role in your ability to navigate these turbulent waters and come out stronger at the end. 

This is the 2nd article in our series: 3 Scenarios for Adjusting Your Data Practice to Business During the Pandemic

Making data-driven decisions— fast— is more important than ever.

Harvard Business Review just published the article: “How to survive a recession and thrive afterward.” It identifies decision making as one of the top 4 ways to navigate a downturn. When the overall environment changes rapidly, leaders need access to data ASAP to find solutions to new problems, whether pinpointing supply chain/logistics problems, measuring engagement amongst remote-working employees, or identifying demand trends and shifts. Your analytics need to access all sorts of data, including new external data sources such as those tracking COVID-19 statistics, in a matter of minutes so your business decisions are as well-informed and speedy as possible.

As most readers of this blog will know, this is why StreamSets exists– to get data as fast as possible into the hands of those who need it. The StreamSets DataOps Platform is designed for the modern practice of delivering data rapidly and continuously with confidence in a world of constant change. And boy, are the changes coming fast and furious. I recently spoke with the team at DisrupTV about this. 

Increase the ROI of your data infrastructure.

To be fiscally prudent in a recessionary environment, it makes sense to reduce or at least minimize the costs of your data infrastructure. That can mean getting the most out of existing infrastructure investments such as a Hadoop data lake or enterprise data warehouse, as well as  finding more efficient ways to get data into, through and out of them. If you’re moving to cloud data platforms, now may be the time to accelerate that migration and leave high-cost legacy systems behind as quickly as possible.

StreamSets supports all the key data platforms, and the StreamSets DataOps platform is fundamentally architected to enable portability across them. So if your goal is to get the most out of existing infrastructure investments, StreamSets makes it easy to get new data sources into those platforms and transformed to be fit-for-purpose. If you’re moving to cloud data platforms, StreamSets can accelerate the migration, and ensure you keep on-premises and cloud platforms in sync. 

Empower your people.

Your data engineering or data integration team’s productivity may be down due to working from home and other COVID-19-related distractions. And the demands on them are likely higher as the business clamors for more information, or makes sudden operational changes. If there is a big right turn into digital transformation, data is at the heart of it. The right tooling can boost productivity of your data team by an order of magnitude. And the easier it is to use, the more easily people can ramp up on something new, even if they are working by themselves, from home, without hands-on coaching. 

It’s also possible that some of your data team members have extra time on their hands. Keep them motivated by letting them apply their skills to new areas like Spark or cloud data platforms with tools that make the shift to new platforms and execution engines easy.  

StreamSets’ easy-to-use, visual tools greatly increase the productivity of your developers and data engineers, regardless of which types of data pipelines they are building. Prebuilt support for a breadth of data patterns, from streaming to ETL to CDC, and data platforms, from Oracle to Hadoop to Databricks enables a modern data integration practice designed for today’s data workloads and platforms. By abstracting away the complexity of platforms like Spark, your team members can easily ramp up in new areas without having to be Scala or PySpark coding ninjas.

Mitigate risk.

This is a risky time, so even if you’re doing okay right now, it’s critical to stay on your toes. From a data perspective, real-time operational visibility into how your data is flowing, allows you to detect and head off any problems at the pass. With so many things changing so fast, and no time for traditional change management processes, data drift detection and handling is critical to minimize outages or data loss. A third risk mitigator is to architect your dataflows so that you can easily use the same data pipelines on a different data infrastructure, migrating from an on-premises Hadoop cluster to Databricks, for example. The more you can design for change in your data flows, the more resilient your data practice.

StreamSets DataOps Platform enables you to build fully instrumented pipelines that give you real-time operational visibility into how your data is flowing. Our unique drift detection and handling capabilities minimize the risk of outages or data loss. That way you can move fast and not worry about things breaking.

How is your organization dealing with Overnight Digital Transformation? Share your story: #amazingdatastories.

Next: Scenario 2: Temporary Hibernation

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