It’s not new to say that we are living the results of the 4th Industrial Revolution happening as we speak. The explosion of data and the acceleration of digital transformation has made some radical transformations across a wide range of industries that are now facing a new problem; that of the storage, processing, and analysis of record amounts of data. The influx of data impacts businesses, as it controls a company’s ability to innovate and deliver services that best serve consumer interests. The problem is that only the structured, quantitative data, can be aggregated in such a way that would impact positively the business. But what about the unstructured ones, which come in a “variety of shapes and sizes”?

Over the past years, data consumption and usage helped enterprises shape new business models and drive a customer-centric approach to transformation. But, for every business that needs to keep up with the pace of change in the following years, it is crucial to have a data-centric infrastructure. With a data-centric architecture, enterprises can support the influx of data from several locations, networks, and users and create centers of data exchange, to cover all their IT infrastructure requirements. With that being said, let’s break down what the term “data-centric architecture” really means: “Data-centric refers to an architecture where data is the primary and permanent asset, and applications come and go. In the data-centric architecture, the data model precedes the implementation of any given application and will be around and valid long after it is gone”.

A data-centric approach marks a mindset shift for most organizations since they are now designing strategies to optimize data management and they build applications to be consistent with those strategies, simplifying their processes. There are several benefits you can reap from a data-centric approach:

- First and foremost, IT teams design their infrastructure around data requirements. They treat data as the central asset that will last forever, optimizing data management and delivery strategies. All applications are built to be consistent with those strategies.

- Secondly, a data-centric infrastructure delivers high availability and reliability, as it makes it easy to share and move data. Organizations can access the data and share or deliver them on-demand and in real-time. It provides the necessary performance, capacity, scalability and security. The infrastructure can evolve to meet changing workload requirements and the adoption of new technologies.

- Thirdly, team members can easily have useful insights into internal and external trends, that can affect their organization. By organizing and analyzing their company’s data, they can surely inform better decisions.

- Last but not least, empowering your infrastructure to optimize data exchange, expedites compliance with new and existing regulations while driving more informed decision-making processes to preserve the integrity, competitiveness, and reputation of your business. 

 

Considering the amount of generated data, it is crucial to develop an architecture that can radically help the performance of employees and facilitate the development of business decisions, projects, and culture. If you want to find out how to adopt a data-centric architecture for your business, do not hesitate to contact our team via this form.