As organisations struggle to capture and leverage multitudes of data, there is a surge of technological options to choose from. Well designed data platforms facilitate experimentation, have shorter time to markets, have faster adaptation to latest advancements in data technologies, promote self-service thereby accelerating data adoption. Data being the key enabler for business transformations, it is vital to build platforms that accelerate validation of use cases and can handle scaling of use cases and users. Designing a platform which is elastic enough to embody all the above can be quite a daunting task.
The primary points to consider when architecting modern data platforms:
- Customer centric
Organisations battle immensely with legacy data technologies to deliver personalization, and customer experience, despite there being so much emphasis on hyper personalization. Thinking on the lines of creating 360 ° customer view helps align technological choices after business pain points.
- Cloud Native
Cloud solutions support elastic scaling, high availability and secure fully managed services with integration to a range of enterprise security systems including LDAP, Active Directory, Kerberos and SAML. Cloud solutions allow pluggable architecture – replacing components if better options are available with minimum reconstructing. Cloud platforms eliminate the time-consuming work of provisioning resources and infrastructure, thereby reducing time to market.
- Multi-platform architectures
Be it multi-cloud or multiple data storage patters, it should be the use cases that dictate the architectural patterns and not vice versa. Datawarehouses, datalakes and NoSQL databases can all co-exist on multi-cloud platforms if the use cases demand so. Organisations should avoid platform/vendor lock-ins, because then businesses are forced to make technology choices that are not in the best interests of the company.
- Microservice-enabled
It is critical to envision data as not just a means for visualization like a diagnostic tool, data is critical to help organizations adapt to change, in evolving business environments and to innovate and every company wants to expedite the process to be the first ones to come up with innovative products and services. Data plays a key role in this aspect. Monolithic applications are a major bottleneck in this case. In microservices based design small decoupled services are developed completely independent of each other to achieve business requirements, faster, generally through REST APIs or event streams.
- Flexible
Modern data platforms should be flexible enough to accomodate rapidly evolving business requirements. Be it integrating new data sources or feeding data into futurist data products. Modern data platforms should simplify testing new ideas on a small scale prior to making heavy investments in infrastructure.
Modernization continues to be a strong trend in data platforms, whether on Hadoop or RDBMS or multi-tenant solutions. It is the ease of integrating new data sources, TCO, prototyping functionalities, security and scaling that matter most in modern platform architectures.
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