Amid growing data disparity and volume, organizations struggling to build a cohesive data strategy can cut through the complexity with quick-win projects that demonstrate clear returns from small upfront investments.
Doing so can further secure buy-in from their leadership team and drive support for an enterprise-wide data and analytics roadmap. This approach is pertinent especially as digital transformation takes center stage and data plays an integral role in driving such initiatives.
IDC notes that executing a digital-first strategy is a C-level priority today. However, without a data and analytics architecture that is fit for purpose, big-ticket investments in digital transformation efforts are likely to fail, it warns.
The research firm predicts that by 2025, 40% of spending on data capture and movement technology in Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan, will be on streaming data pipelines. These will enable a new generation of real-time simulation, optimization and recommendation capabilities.
In addition, by 2023, 20% of business intelligence solutions in the region will incorporate intelligent knowledge networks, the research found. These will extend core machine learning-powered user augmentation with collaborative and collective intelligence functionality, according to IDC.
As an increasing amount of data is generated and collected, though, the analysis will require scalable and flexible tools robust enough to provide insights in a timely fashion. This is made more challenging as the number of new tools grows and existing ones lose relevance with technological advancements. Organizations can find it difficult to keep pace.
As data continues to expand in volume and come from increasingly disparate sources, businesses can find building a data and analytics infrastructure overwhelming.
Bite-Size Data Projects Provide a Quick Route to Returns
Companies can mitigate some of the risks and complexity by opting for smaller data projects. These should not only require smaller upfront investment but also demonstrate strong returns to C-level stakeholders. When they are able to prove they can deliver value, quick-start projects can pave the way for future funding to support a broader, enterprise-wide data and analytics deployment.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner eCloudvalley advocates the importance of quick-start programs and offers them across three verticals: financial services, smart retail and manufacturing.
In the financial sector, for instance, eCloudvalley provides quick-start programs for customer 360 and fraud detection. It also offers an omnichannel integration quick-start program for retail customers.
Powered by AWS, each comprises a small data project that covers all premises needed as system fundamentals.
While each is different, most quick-start initiatives can be carried out in anywhere from 20 days to four to six weeks. Some "lightweight" projects, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning quick-start efforts that can be deployed in any vertical, can be delivered in just three days to provide customers with fast insights.
Quick-start programs from eCloudvalley are ideal for companies looking to start small before expanding at a later stage to more complete data analytics solutions. They are particularly useful for organizations that need a basic understanding of how data analytics can help them solve business problems. Companies can use this knowledge to plan a longer roadmap.
Speed Up Business Decisions With Better Data Access
When they get data right, businesses can gain tremendous value from their ability to quickly access insights to power their decisions.
A pan-Asian retailer, for example, had found it difficult to perform advanced retail analytics and access timely sales reports on its on-premises data processing system. It held large data volumes from processing 20 billion transactions per year across its stores. The company specializes in processing and wholesaling food and personal products. It operates more than 5,000 stores across 10 Asian markets, employing more than 200,000 workers, and has $10 billion in revenue.
With eCloudvalley's help, the retailer implemented Amazon Redshift, a cloud data warehouse designed to make it easy and cost effective to carry out analytics on large data volumes. Its massive parallel processing capabilities helped it shorten data processing times.
Amazon Redshift is touted to deliver as much as 10 times the performance of traditional databases for data warehousing and analytics workloads. It enables businesses to run queries against exabytes worth of data in Amazon S3, without the need to load or extract, transform and load (ETL).
With Amazon Redshift, the retailer was able to slash its ETL time from more than 20 hours to just 1.5 hours.
In another case, eCloudvalley guided a Hong Kong-based investment management firm's efforts to leverage data for more efficient decision-making. The firm was unable to quickly identify new business opportunities and emerging market trends, which led to a dip in customer loyalty. Its previous data analytics tools were inflexible and unable to power research analytics—a capability it depended on.
The investment management firm also was experiencing sluggish performance from its big data analytics system, which was analyzing data from a dynamic and diverse stock market.
Under eCloudvalley's stewardship, the firm implemented AWS as its data lake and analytics platform. It also ran Tableau as its data analytics and visualization tool. The initiative enabled the firm to complete analysis of all data, including dynamic market data, from across Southeast Asia in mere minutes. Its business users also could more easily understand financial data analytics through visualization reports and thus make more efficient decisions.
Data is a valuable asset for organizations, but it requires a robust strategy that is sustainable and capable of demonstrating clear returns. AWS, alongside partners such as eCloudvalley, can help enterprise customers achieve that.
As a publicly listed cloud consulting company, eCloudvalley supports enterprise customers in their digital transformation efforts with the cloud. It has served a clientele of more than 1,000 and runs a team of cloud specialists with more than 500 certifications. These include cloud migration, data solutions, and automated cloud management.
