There’s no denying it — data is the most valuable commodity for modern business. According to research from IDC, digital data created will increase to 180 zettabytes by 2025 globally. If these estimations are correct, organisations will have to prioritise data gathering and analysis across all levels within a company to unlock new business insights, customer insights and better serve the markets they operate in.
However, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of data touch points, where data is now being gathered by everything from marketing apps to new technology innovations such as IoT. To stay on top of the vast treasure trove of data being gathered and remain competitive in the marketplace, the trend of modern data sharing is set to revolutionise business by providing real-time access to data both within and external to an organisation.
Riding the data-sharing economy innovation wave: sink or swim?
Transform your business through data sharing
Data sharing will form a new data economy, easily providing access to data between teams inside the same enterprise, or between different businesses. Modern data sharing instantly levels the playing field for any organisation wanting to share data and consume shared data across its business units, with its customers and business partners, and to share and monetise governed data sets. Picture it as a seamless flow of data across different trusted parties, without the burden of having to wait hours if not days for the specified data.
As a result, new business models and market opportunities emerge, unlike previously imagined. Companies that take advantage of data sharing ecosystems, open their insights exponentially and will advance ahead of their competitors by utilising data held by other organisations. For example, organisations that are separated by different time zones and locations will boost their collaboration and communication through adopting data sharing models.
This ecosystem will thus enable organisations to make better use of their resources by allowing staff to spend time analysing data as opposed to sourcing it and making requests for access, as well as having more data at their fingertips to analyse.
Overcoming legacy and more stringent regulation in the financial industry with data science
Drop the legacy tech for a modern infrastructure
While there are undoubted benefits to data sharing, for too long, organisations have relied on legacy technologies, such as outdated big data platforms or on premises data warehouses to manage their data, which have been ill-equipped to meet modern data requirements. With the number of data access points available, legacy tech has been unable to handle large datasets, especially as the velocity, variety and volume of data continues to grow.
Simple querying of data would take days or even weeks to generate on traditional on premises technology, posing a real issue in getting immediate answers. This has meant that while internal data is easier to access, external data has been far more difficult.
Thankfully, the birth of cloud-built data warehouses is helping alleviate much of these struggles and helping organisations capitalise on the data sharing economy. This fits hand-in-hand with the natural progression for organisations’ growing adoption of cloud infrastructures, with 85% of organisations expected to adopt cloud technologies by 2020 — according to a survey from McAfee. The advent of cloud democratises data across an organisation, meaning everyone from junior staff to the board has access to insights, while also solving the concurrency issue suffered from legacy data platforms.
The data journey: It’s only the beginning for digital transformation Big Data LDN
Starting the data sharing journey
Exemplifying data sharing, Parkinson’s UK is capitalising on cloud data warehousing in order to share data from its work with other research institutions such as universities and pharmaceutical companies in real-time. This is helping speed the advances of treatment and communication about the condition faster than ever before.
Another organisation taking advantage of modern data sharing is start-up Lime, who provide electric scooters and bikes across the US and Europe. Lime helps would-be riders quickly locate a set of wheels and provides administrators with the data they need to keep their local transportation programs running efficiently and cost-effectively. Lime is additionally sharing this data back with the communities it works with in order to help transportation departments better understand traffic flows, all through the power of data sharing.
As organisations continue to advance their cloud strategies, adopting a cloud-built data warehouse which powers a data sharing environment will be integral in ensuring organisations capitalise on the power of data. Data silos, bottlenecks and concurrency issues will become a thing of the past as modern data sharing ushers in a new era of collaboration and communication between organisations.
