With a growing number of merger and acquisition activities and more social media platforms emerging, there is more data to consume than ever before. The volume and speed at which data is generated daily clearly demonstrates that big data isn’t slowing – and its scale is only set to increase.
With this comes a greater demand for data architecture services to understand the high volumes of data being handled and processed daily. To unlock the full potential of an organisation’s data, data architecture not only tells the story behind the data but also orchestrates the outcome beyond simply reporting. This helps organisations to align their data with its vision and the people accessing and reading it, driving actions and uniting teams toward informed data-driven decision-making.
What is big data?
As an increasing volume of data is being produced and managed, this creates data sets that are too large and complex to be handled by standard software. Due to its continuous expansion, big data is constantly evolving with input from disparate sources, requiring equally adaptable frameworks. This is where data architecture comes in.
Big data has many applications within an organisation, including understanding what information can be shared and how. For example, big data insights can help to discover profit lines, meet regulatory requirements across different geographical locations and conduct customer sentiment analysis.
What is the role of data architecture for big data?
Data architecture forms the framework required to manage data assets and their interactions. These data assets can involve any data generation or storage points, such as operational systems, databases and emails. Data interactions concern how the data is stored, accessed, collated and distributed, so data architecture essentially forms your data journey and tells the story behind it. These stories provide valuable information and insights that can have a meaningful impact on your business decisions.
Data architecture has evolved to meet big data consumption, demonstrating that organisations must drive data literacy from the top down for effective implementation. Data leaders and execs must realise that a single data system is not the solution – there is a need for data strategies and data literate teams too.
Explore Dufrain’s data architecture offering.
Data architecture services in practice
Financial services
Data architecture can enable financial institutions to draw consistent meaning from the vast amounts of structured and unstructured data created through various systems. The streamlined data architecture across structured and unstructured datasets is key to meeting demands such as fraud detection, risk modelling, credit risk analysis and regulatory requirements.
Marketing
Using a robust data architecture framework, marketers can utilise structured and unstructured data generated by clients, enabling them to devise effective data strategies to gather crucial information. This in turn facilitates improved customer targeting and evaluation of the effectiveness of marketing efforts. By combining this data with customer feedback from multiple channels, organisations can enhance their marketing spend allocation, concentrating on customer retention and expanding their customer base.
Artificial intelligence
With the emergence and growing uptake of AI and ML applications, there is an increased need for data architecture strategies that manage the data input to drive better outcomes. Data architecture facilitates better data quality and integration with scalable solutions, allowing better lineage and enrichment.
“To become a successful data-driven organisation, you need to implement a data strategy that drives a data culture. This is achieved by educating your people on how to access and use the relevant data, driving a mindset shift.” – Junaid Sharif, Senior Manager
Designing scalable data architecture with bespoke accelerators
To create a data culture that leads to a successful data strategy, organisations should employ the correct level of technology and processes for each team. These processes should meet their requirements for the data, to grow data literacy within teams. The first step in developing a coherent data strategy is through a data capability assessment, which generates actionable objectives to address any data challenges within your organisation.
Following this assessment, there are several tools that Dufrain implements to support scalable data architecture. Data architecture sits at the core of Dufrain’s accelerators, which are each in turn designed to support our clients’ tailored data requirements.
ARC
ARC rapidly delivers a cloud architecture framework to enable automated reporting in cloud reporting solutions such as Azure, AWS and GCP in just a few days. This dramatically reduces the time, cost and risk associated with data reporting.
Use ARC to:
- Immediately access quality data for analytics
- Automate manual processes to save time
- Leverage scalability to meet the needs of your growing business.
FlightPath
FlightPath saves Dufrain’s clients up to 60% per source system by significantly accelerating data migration, providing full visibility whilst migrating data between environments at pace. Our unique data migration accelerator can also be combined with our data migration framework to enable repeatable and scalable migrations.
This has a clear positive impact, with the implementation of FlightPath within a digital health business resulting in the successful migration of around 930,000 unstructured documents, 6,000 clients and £38 million worth of premiums.
Use FlightPath to:
- Reduce overheads and risk
- Support your existing architecture
- Reduce the requirement for additional technical resources.
ControlTower
ControlTower rapidly assesses and mitigates risk within unstructured data to accelerate GDPR compliance. By locating and identifying files, performing a sensitivity check and classifying each document, ControlTower provides recommendations for files that are out of retention date or require classification.
Use ControlTower to:
- Drive data compliance in your business from the bottom up
- Provide a self-serve function for managers to run scans and perform housekeeping
- Streamline the time and cost needed to achieve data compliance.
Dufrain’s data capability assessment outlines your organisation’s data architecture capability and provides a comprehensive data strategy. Our team will support you to achieve the best outcome for your business using tools and processes tailored to your organisation.
[km-cta-block padding=20 block-classes=”has-dark-teal-background-colour has-white-colour” label=”Contact us for a free data health check” ]
Start your journey towards flexible data architecture services
Contact the Dufrain team today to discuss your data architecture requirements with our data experts.
[km_button link=”https://www.dufrain.co.uk/contact/” classes=”cta-2″]Contact us[/km_button] or [km_button link=”tel:08001303656″ classes=”cta-2″]Call us on 0800 130 3656[/km_button][/km-cta-block]