Taylor Bird, Vice President of AWS Products and Services at Onica, was recently featured in a CIO Dive article that takes a closer look at the technology of data lakes, their impact on data storage and analytics as well as some considerations to keep in mind when building and managing data lakes to maximize the value that can be derived from them.
Featuring insights from a diverse set of industry experts, “In data lake deployments, ease of access lights the way” explores the growing prominence of data lakes which have been instrumental in the emergence of new capabilities that did not exist back when traditional data warehouses were the primary mode of data storage for purposes such as business analytics. World renowned games like Fortnite, with record-breaking user bases, are leveraging data lake infrastructures to maximize speed and flexibility, handling petabytes of new data each month and operating at a level that was never possible in the past.
As centralized repositories of data, data lakes differ from data warehouses in allowing the storage of raw, unstructured data on infrastructure that is scalable and flexible, utilizing the elasticity of the cloud. The article suggests that taking full advantage of data lakes requires evaluating whether a data lake solution is the right one for your particular business needs, and then having a strategy and an idea of the insights that will be generated before the data is moved into the lake in order to maximize efficiency in analytics.
Data Lakes have been growing in adoption over the years and the process of setting them up has become cheaper and easier, radically drawing down the barriers to entry. While this has allowed more and more organizations to benefit from the advantages of data lakes, data ingestion without any planning for insights has become a growing problem.
Taylor Bird, Vice President of AWS Products and Services at Onica, advises that setting up data lakes without a clear idea of the analytical expectations for that data can be a disastrous position to be in. Unutilized information sitting in silos in data lakes can land companies in a situation where they have “data black holes”, wasting resources and misguiding leaders away from the insights that will truly help them generate value. While data lakes can be deployed without defining all the insights on day one, Taylor Bird advises against setting-up data lakes preemptively without having a plan in place to tackle insights in the future.
The article also tackles various other aspects of data lakes, including the option of opening access to infrastructure and capabilities across enterprises, security and management considerations to protect access as well as secondary data derived from analytics that can help produce more comprehensive, actionable insights.
To read the full article, visit CIO Dive here.
Are you curious about how to set-up and manage data lakes on AWS? Read our blog on Simplifying Data Lakes with AWS Lake Formation. If you’re interested in what data lakes have to offer and how you can leverage data analytics to drive informed business decisions, get in touch with our data engineering and analytics experts today.
