The digital age has brought with it a myriad of dizzying innovations, not least of the countless revolutions in the field of data analytics that's caused a spurt of startups over the past few years. Many contemporary startups are still struggling to iron out a coherent analytics strategy, however, especially when it comes to incorporating data lakes into their operations.
In the near future, data lakes will be nearly as ubiquitous a term as the cloud, such is their importance to modern startups. Here's why these data lakes are so important, and how they're set to redefine the use of data in the business world as we know it.
A different way of looking at data
The explosion of the internet of things and the growth of countless economic sectors that require extensive amounts of information to operate is the defining aspect of the 21st-century economy. Thus far, however, we've been looking at data through a peculiar, narrow lens that hasn't enabled us to capture its true potential. That's where data lakes come into play, as they offer a broader picture of the information environment companies are operating within, and enable business leaders to make important decisions with more comprehensive and representative data before them.
Up until now, siloed sources of data have been the norm, which has seriously held many businesses back. Siloed data sources destroy the potential businesses hold within them because it results in decision-making that's guided by narrow bits of data that don't necessarily explain the whole picture. By relying on a data lake instead of a third-party data warehouse, your business would be making use of all available digital information rather than just that which AI-driven algorithms deem important.
By encompassing all possible information that could be pertinent to your specific business problem, data lakes enable business leaders to make holistic decisions that take into account every possible quirk or oddity of an agreement. As research from McKinsey makes clear, most contemporary organizations are in dire-need of a data overhaul, and implementing data lakes offer them the potential to achieve this overhaul at a relatively low price.
Data-management infrastructure can't be developed overnight, however, which is one of the reasons that data lakes haven't been given enough attention in the field of data analytics recently. Some companies and IT specialists were hesitant to embrace the raw format of a data lake instead of the more processed information available to them in a data warehouse, but have since come to see the error in their ways.
They're perfect for startups
All of this has the net effect of making data lakes excellent for startups. Besides the fact that they offer easy access to huge swathes of info, data lakes are also quite easily scalable compared to many alternatives. Whereas a startup may have to shell out the big bucks to purchase the services of a data warehouse or a third-party database serving an IT inventory tool, for instance, it could simply expand its data lake operations instead without relying on a pre-built warehouse structure.
Finally, data lakes are hubs of innovation because they're perfect for creative professionals to fiddle with. Startups, which often rely on the savviness of their early human capital, can rely on data lakes to help unleash a flourish of creativity in their daily operations. Rather than locking your startup into a specific paradigm, a data lake offers flexibility instead of a rigid structure that could stymie your worker's creativity.
Expect to hear more and more about data lakes as time goes on. As the future rapidly unfolds, we'll come to see that these exiting pools of digital information are the next big step towards a better digital economy.
