How to Upgrade Your Business with Data Warehouse Modernisation

Businesses everywhere have been waking up to the idea that their data warehouse isn’t just an IT tool tucked away in a back room. It has since become the engine powering their performance and security for the long run.

But what does it mean to have a “modern” data warehouse? And what does it mean for businesses that want to migrate their data elsewhere? Let’s take a closer look and unpack what modernising means for your data infrastructure.

Why Modernise Your Data Warehouse?

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That saying stayed true for years, but not in today’s business environment. It constantly demands more from your data than ever before, and it needs storage solutions that can transform the way you operate. That’s the dilemma that modern data warehouses solve from day one.

Cost savings, enhanced performance, and stronger security are just the tip of the benefits iceberg. The simple act of data modernisation gives you the power to ask questions about your data that you never thought possible before.

The Power and Security of Process Optimisation

One of the biggest boons that modernisation brings is the elimination of information silos. Data that is stored in scattered locations causes inconvenience for everyone, and time is wasted hunting where it physically is. 

Modern data warehouses centralise everything, enabling:

• Predictive maintenance to avoid costly downtimes

• Automated data analysis, which reduces the need for specialised data scientists

• Streamlined workflows for more savings

The Three Pillars of Modern Data Warehousing

1. Excellent Performance at Any Scale

Choosing between speed and volume used to be a hard decision for businesses. Not anymore. Modern cloud-based data warehouses eliminate that trade-off entirely. You can analyse 10,000 customers or 100,000, performance remains consistent.

Azure's modern data warehouse technology can increase your data processing capacity by ten times. Some organisations report that analyses that once took hours now complete in minutes.

2. Unlimited Scalability

Here's a sobering thought ... in 2018, IDC predicted that digital data will grow from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 zettabytes by 2025 – that's a 61% compound annual growth rate. And we actually exceeded that as the current digital data is now at 181 zettabytes. Your data warehouse needs to handle this explosion without breaking a sweat.

Modern solutions scale automatically. Need to analyse streaming data from IoT devices? No problem. Want to incorporate social media sentiment analysis? Easy.

3. Enhanced Function and Security

Data warehouses now go beyond storing information. They now add value through built-in analytics, automated management, and enterprise-grade security. A good data warehouse should be secure enough to keep confidential information safe. And on top of that, it should also be simple enough that your team can focus on insights instead of infrastructure management.

How It Translates in the Real World

To see all these happen in the real world, let’s look at the case of Carnival Maritime. They modernised their data warehouse with Azure SQL Data Warehouse. With this shift, they analysed historical data alongside real-time information about ship speed, passenger demographics, and weather patterns.

The end result was an optimisation in water production schedules and ultimately led to a reduction in operational costs. This is what modern data warehousing does in a nutshell. It combines different data types and sources to answer the most complex business questions, which leads to better ways to run the business.

How to Get Started with Data Warehouse Modernisation

The results are big in scale, but starting out isn’t. Start by asking yourself these questions:

• How long does it take to access the data you need?

• Are you missing opportunities because insights arrive too late?

• Is your current system limiting your ability to scale?

The Bottom Line

Modernising your data warehouse may look like a huge and overreaching leap at first glance, but once uncertainties are cleared, it will completely change your business for the better. Modernising your data warehouse has a number of benefits: it saves time and money by optimising processes, it allows you to scale up your analytics so you can get more out of your data, and it better protects your information to keep it safe from hackers and criminals.