Digital transformation in the new normal will need cautiously planned strategies to see efficient and productive business growth. Crises like Covid-19 demonstrate that predicting the future is impossible. Some of the key areas to be focused on include,
- Assessment of the current state of an organization’s digital transformation.
- Defining goals and creating the transformation roadmap.
- Adopting vital technologies and tools.
Organizations need to focus on bringing new business models to better position their business in line with disruption. Diverse cultures and win-win partnerships will help organizations level up their decision making and bring innovative perspectives to the growth table.
Where is the Digital Trajectory Off To?
Gartner predicted that over 50% of organizations saw their transformation readiness to be uncertain. As everything modernizes faster, evolution in data analytics is becoming essential for organizations to make their business future-ready. While digital transformation is an ongoing process, the new normal has made organizations maximize their transformation efforts. This is mainly driven by the need for seamless customer engagements through the remote workforce. Also, most organizations have begun focusing on their cybersecurity, stacking up the infrastructure to enable the remote workforce.
Investments in the digital infrastructure, along with cybersecurity for data protection, is perceived to bridge the digital divide. Ensuring infrastructure security during digitalization necessitates the mitigation of blind spots with enhanced visibility. The global pandemic forced organizations across the globe into immediate crisis management. While many were striving to stand strong amid challenges, Blazeclan was putting immense efforts into supporting organizations in their digital transformation journey.
What Does Future-Ready Really Mean?
Confident organizations with well-thought-of strategies are growing through challenges. Future-ready businesses have novel ways of addressing challenges. Rebuilding resilience in the wake of a crisis and reinforcing it is a key attribute of future-ready businesses. These businesses adapt to changing customer behaviours faster with sustainability as the standard. They are always rethinking the way they shore their workplace with competitive intelligence that tackles new opportunities and challenges of data with less effort.
Making the Data Future-Ready
IDC predicts that by 2024, over 50% IT budgets of organizations will be dedicated to digital transformation and innovation. Multifaceted evolution is the virtue of digital transformation and data modernization is a crucial facet. This further needs a detailed analysis of processes to establish the pipeline of business objectives and achieving them effectively.
“The role of data has evolved significantly over the years, and it is imperative that organizations looking to stay competitive in today’s market needs to harness data as a strategic asset. Simply aggregating and analyzing data collected internally is no longer sufficient. The real value lies in data collected from across both internal and external sources, and this can be done by sharing data securely via a data marketplace.”
– Geoff Soon, Managing Director – South Asia, Snowflake
The bigger picture is the long-term benefits that data modernization delivers, which include
- Easy integration with the data science ecosystem.
- Unavoidable and significant cost savings.
- Near real-time data analytics and insights.
- Management of voluminous data at scale.
Snowflake, Blazeclan’s partner for powering data on the cloud, facilitates organizations in transitioning to the cloud seamlessly. It enables organizations to achieve a complete overview of their customer relationships. As Snowflake is built for the cloud, they are capable of building a single data lake and gaining better scalability with high performance. In the case of IoT and connected devices, organizations are able to effectively analyze large volumes of time-series data. Snowflake also supports and facilitates connectivity between data-intensive applications by leveraging in-application analytics.
Pros of Going Data-Driven with Snowflake
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), where administration and management efforts are eliminated.
- Multi-cloud support, where organizations can run on different cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Independent scalability of compute and storage.
- Support for unlimited query concurrency.
An effective underlying architecture for data modernization is the decoupling of compute and storage. This helps organizations in scaling them separately as per requirement. Key components of such an architecture are the cloud, compute and storage. Cloud services help organizations in managing metadata, data authorization, and data authentication. Compute services support various workloads such as data engineering, data sharing, and data lake, while the underlying cloud storage service provides unlimited storage and default data encryption.
Data modernization is touted to be the beginning of the journey towards digitization. However, nothing comes without challenges. Key concerns of organizations here include vendor lock-in, infrastructure costs, and data security. As such, modernizing traditional platforms involves building the foundation to be future-ready with machine learning, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence.
“Innovation is the key for future-ready businesses. Yesterday’s delight is today’s normal for the businesses, where ever-changing economics and new demand keeps them on their toes. At Blazeclan, we keep on innovating within the Data and Analytics arena to empower our customers to cope up with this continuous change by enabling them with rapid, data-driven decision-making capability followed by actionable insights. Machine Learning and AI are the key growth parameters for remaining ahead of the competition and utilizing enterprise Data efficiently can create this competitive advantage. It is critical that you create a robust data roadmap and strategy that lays the foundation for becoming a digitally future-ready organization.”
– Baxish Mission, Former SU Head – Data Analytics & Insights, Blazeclan Technologies
Measurable outcomes of going data-driven include
- Turning the clusters on and off based on idle time.
- Support with the lightweight format for storing and transitioning semi-structured data.
- Schema on Read with various types of data.
- A single data copy for access across multiple clusters.
Moving Forward
Organizations must primarily focus on digital transformation and data modernization as major stepping stones to become a future-ready business. Creating such an ecosystem will bring agility in facing customers with a faster time-to-delivery. This makes a massive impact on business growth, ensuring enhanced customer experiences. Moreover, this meets the requirements of modern business and allows for greater governance.
