Gartner’s Top 10 Data and Analytics Trends for 2023 highlighted a global focus on driving more business value from data – a trend we are seeing in South Africa, too. Locally, we’re seeing demand not only for better business value from data, but also the ability to achieve control and visibility of data – in a consistent manner – across hybrid, multicloud and on-premise environments.
Changing data trends
Data sharing has become essential, with a need to assemble and enrich underlying data, apply continuous analytics over metadata and allow consumers to become creators.
A platform-to-ecosystems theme has emerged in South Africa, where we see customers seeking to optimise the value of data and become proactive instead of reactive. For local businesses, it has become crucial to optimise the value of data by linking it to the priorities of the business. For that to be effective, we first need to ensure that good clean, trusted data is readily and easily available and that all distributed data is made available in real time or as close to real time as possible.
We also see organisations looking at reducing their physical data centre footprints, with smaller, more powerful infrastructure likely to minimise power utilisation due to load shedding.
A solution for changing needs
Meeting these changing needs, a solution such as Yellowbrick cloud data warehouse combines an open architecture and the industry’s best economics, efficiency and performance to simplify and modernise analytics and give organisations full control over data. Yellowbrick can live inside the cloud-native application – simplifying architecture and reducing latency to make data available faster in the cloud, in the data centre or at the edge. Yellowbrick is the modern data warehouse designed to solve today’s analytics challenges, offering full elasticity thanks to separate storage and computing.
Yellowbrick minimises the path from data at rest to the CPU to give businesses faster answers, allowing them to become more proactive. Customers migrating to Yellowbrick end up running analytics on up to 97% less infrastructure than they did previously, slashing costs.
Culture shifts
It should be noted that digital transformation and moving to derive true business value from data requires a cultural change as much as a technological change.
In “The Culture of Data Leaders” by Keystone, research shows that cultural themes distinguishing leaders from laggards include adopting a growth mindset towards risk and continuous learning, believing data is critical to enable the evolution of the organisation, using data to create a transparent and collaborative environment, and using data as the metric of measurement against performance.
Leader behaviour as outlined in the Keystone report has emerged as a top trend in the new Gartner report, too. Under three key themes – thinking like a business, platforms to ecosystems, and don’t forget the humans – we see Gartner breaking down the trends that enable value optimisation and data sharing. We believe it is from a culture perspective that these trends will really take effect.
European analyst firm BARC’s Data, BI & Analytics Trend Monitor 2023 study findings echo this view, with the establishment of a data culture ranked second only to data quality and master data management as the most important trend for the year.
Developing a data culture means not only raising awareness about the power of data, and empowering users in the organisation to analyse it, but also developing a culture of security and compliance. The more data available to users, the better. But this transparency doesn’t come without risks, so organisations must have a strong data governance framework in place, new roles and responsibilities should be created to strengthen security, risk and compliance, and users across the organisation-wide must be trained to handle data responsibly.
- The author, Chris Pallikarides, is MD of ITBusiness, a company in the KID Group and a Yellowbrick data warehouse partner in Africa
- Read more articles by ITBusiness and the KID Group on TechCentral
- This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned
