Data, more than ever, has become the strategic asset driving business transformation to uncover new insights to differentiate and compete. Traditionally, this asset has been collected and stored in an enterprise data warehouse where it is aimed to serve as the single version of the truth.

That’s according to Johan Du Preez, data and analytics architect at Ovations.

The data and analytics world is rapidly evolving, and businesses more than ever require answers at the speed of business. This fuels enterprises to look seriously at new modern approaches to answer these critical business questions and to gain differentiating insights across more than just the traditional line-of-business systems — CRM and ERP sources.

The traditional data warehouse has serious challenges. It is not just agile enough to answer constantly evolving business questions and does not have the ability to scale sufficiently to produce relevant, holistic and differentiating insights.

Fail fast and be bold

This is crucial to competing effectively in the current business environment. The traditional data warehouse cannot be fast and bold enough, for it is too rigid.

An approach to support and encourage proofs of concept and fast iterations is now required with new agility and freedom to try out new ideas and innovate with less risk and cost.

The traditional data warehouse knows structured data well but in the world we live in, semi-structured and unstructured “big data” is exactly where the differentiation lies — and it breaks the traditional enterprise data warehouse.

Big data architectures have matured in line with the massive rise of social media and the Internet of things (IoT). These big data architectures and technologies were built for petabyte-scale — consider Twitter and Facebook.

Data in enterprises will only grow should they embrace modern data warehouse architectures and gain the benefit aligned with the astronomical growth in data at a global scale.

In this white paper, we look at the ways in which the traditional data warehouse is breaking, we address the evolution to the modern data warehouse, big data architecture for enterprise data and how data monetisation is now possible through agility.