Part Four in The Digital Platform Blog Series: Laying the Foundation for an Intelligent Enterprise
Data has great power. In every decision made, it generates evidence-based insights that can dramatically change the trajectory of business success, the condition of people’s lives, and even the impact of geological events. And this transformational potential is further magnified when a network of data sources is consolidated, cleansed, and shared.
Such a perspective on data is inspiring organizations, like
Hakusan Corporation, to give people something that money can’t buy – peace of mind. The leading manufacturer of production facilities developed a smartphone app that measures the impact of earthquakes in buildings across Japan. By processing hundreds of thousands of data points as quickly as they are captured, the app helps building owners, contractors, and government officials understand the damage to a building’s structural integrity accurately and immediately.
Whenever I share this story, executives often wonder if their business can take advantage of the same degree of ingenuity, creativity, and pragmatism when handling large volumes of data. And from my perspective, the answer is always a resounding “yes” as long as they are ready for a new approach to data management.
Hybrid data management creates a foundation for fast, inspired thinking
The more distributed and diverse data becomes, the greater the complexity when managing it all in a legacy on-premises environment. Unfortunately, this new reality also means that businesses can be locked out of adopting new ways to use existing assets to meet their future needs. The situation can be especially challenging for IT teams as boardroom executives contemplate the potential of using machine learning and artificial intelligence to determine strategies and automate processes.
Taking advantage of the increased efficiency, automation, and agility that the latest intelligent technologies provide requires a new way of thinking about the state of today’s IT software landscapes. Now more than ever, IT organizations need to find better ways to connect or gather data scattered across the business into a single data universe.
For this reason, cloud-based database management systems are increasingly being embraced. This tactic opens the door to the speed and fundamental changes necessary to allow applications to
access and analyze live transactional data to adjust operations in the moment, instead of delaying action until a conclusion is reached.
Such a move doesn’t necessarily require difficult-to-justify trade-offs such as choosing one cloud provider over another and moving all data and legacy applications from on-premises environments. With enterprise platform-as-a-service (PaaS), such as
SAP Cloud Platform, businesses can run on multiple clouds while leveraging data from all sources – regardless of whether they run in the cloud or on premises.
Adopting a PaaS that runs on multiple hyperscale cloud providers gives businesses the flexibility to develop and deploy applications leveraging data in public clouds – including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure – as well as on-premises environments. More importantly, they have the freedom to pick best-of-breed services from hyperscale cloud vendors to meet their application needs.
According to
IDC, this strategy helps businesses stay competitive in an ever-evolving marketplace as they acquire capabilities such as:
- Creation of demand models to predict, use, and support investment decisions
- Real-time risk analysis to drive differentiating customer service
- Support services delivering real-time alerts and notifications
- Enablement of field sales teams with real-time data on customer trends
Competitive precision found in a multicloud, fully managed data platform
Business operations and processes are increasingly driven by and intertwined with an enormous volume of data. But instead of being overwhelmed and leaving much of it unused, companies are discovering the value of managing and maintaining this asset in a multi-deployment environment consisting of a varied portfolio of cloud environments and on-premise landscapes.
By using a cloud-based data management approach, businesses can form a digital core of intelligence that empowers every decision-maker – regardless of role – to derive insights and contribute to the bottom line through data-driven innovation.
Learn more
Discover how data management in the cloud can turn your business into an intelligent enterprise.
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