Why we should make data as accessible as water or electricity

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Data drives the modern world. Organizations of all types depend on massive, fast-growing and evolving data sets to deliver more intelligent services and drive business growth. Given its importance and ubiquity, data should be treated like a utility, just like water, gas, and electricity. But how do we achieve this?

We are all very much aware that data must be made readily available, relevant and easy to use for everyone as we intend to keep pace with current developments in data and technology. In this piece, we’ll explore how organizations can use and consume data as if it were a utility by leveraging open source databases, data integration, and modern data management tools.

Accessible data and the democratization of data

Utilities are simple and accessible to everyone. Flip a switch and the light comes on, turn a faucet and water comes out. Data should be just as accessible and reliable. This need has led to the much-discussed democratization of data to enable the ubiquity of business intelligence and the emergence of AI in the enterprise.

The first step in the process is to adopt open source technology, which helps to democratize and lower the barrier to entry to use technologies while improving their quality and reliability. Democratization is the idea that anyone can use and benefit from a particular resource. Like energy, open source projects are open to everyone – and the community determines the direction those projects go, determines what features are added, and what use cases are supported.

However, before organizations can take advantage of an open source technology, business leaders must determine what their business needs most from it. This can be scalability, availability, security or a combination of these. Answering this question is the first step to successfully leveraging open source and choosing technologies that simultaneously meet the needs of the organization.

Accessible data: Durable databases provide easy access to data

Data accessibility is perhaps the most critical factor in treating data as a utility. Powerful, modern databases will play a central role in supporting that accessibility. To make this possible – and to ensure that organizations can easily extract value from all their data – emerging database technology must use the following:

Hybrid Transactions/Analytical Processing (HTAP) Architecture: HTAP database technology supports real-time situational awareness and decision making over live transaction data and eliminates potential friction between IT and business goals. Cloud-native architecture: Cloud-native databases offer improved flexibility, scalability, reliability, and availability compared to traditional databases.

A combination of the two – cloud-native, HTAP databases – will be particularly important for any organization, for example in the e-commerce and finance sectors, which needs to support a huge number of customer transactions and rapidly growing data volumes while creating new apps. to provide new services.

Data integration improves business results

Another step to make data work as a utility is to enable it to support specific business purposes. For example, organizations can optimize processes through data integration (or data sharing). From collecting more relevant data and generating more robust data and analytics to solving business challenges and accelerating the path to business goals, data sharing keeps the wheels turning.

According to the sixth annual Gartner Chief Data Officer Survey, data sharing is a business-focused key performance indicator that reflects effective engagement and the true business value of data. In fact, data integration enables systems to extract knowledge and insights from structured and unstructured data, converting existing data into knowledge that can be turned into actionable insights, optimizing processes.

Organizations must eliminate silos to achieve full data integration. To do that, they need to use a database that can provide unified insight into both analytical and transactional data.

The role of data management tools

To build a culture with a data-sharing mindset, organizations must use management tools that enable team collaboration and productivity. Leaders must remain aware that as the responsibility for data grows, so does the pressure to make it accessible to all organizations. Data management tools provide the “glue” to enable data sharing in an organization and ultimately make this transformation a reality.

Working to turn data into a utility

Businesses and organizations of all shapes and sizes increasingly rely on data to deliver new products and services. To drive continuous innovation and greater efficiency, data needs to become even more accessible and user-friendly. This means you should treat it like a utility. Making data a fundamental element necessary for the operation of any modern organization.

Open source databases, data integration and data management tools are critical to this transition – let’s get started.

Max Liu is CEO and co-founder of PingCAP.

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