Let’s talk about data. By now, we understand that data is coming at us at different shapes and formats, at a pace that we have never experienced before. More importantly, we are now aware of how important data is. Knowledge is power. Data brings you and your business the power to flourish and succeed.
Yet, success is not only a function of the amounts of data you gather or not even its quality. Wine makers know that having great vineyards means nothing if you don’t know how to produce good wine. So, you may be sitting on a thousand “barrels” of data you have collected from the best “vineyards” and still, not getting the desired outcome – insights to the business.
Another important aspect is of course having the right tools in place. Running Big Data projects means using and taking advantage of a whole net of technologies to help you gather the data, store it, process it and finally, run the analytics. These are the four major steps of every big data project and each step introduces growing levels of complexity.
This complexity only increases with the introduction of cloud. Naturally, with the large amounts of data generated in the digital era, you want to look at cheaper options rather than keep buying more and more hardware.
To make it even more appealing, all major cloud vendors offer a comprehensive, rich set of data services for ingesting, storing, processing and analyzing data. Most of the new data-driven applications are developed from day one in the cloud and solutions such as Amazon EMR, Azure HDinsight and other cloud-based data servers are becoming very popular.
There are a growing number of tools and processing elements out there and you need them all to be well connected, and run in harmony, to ensure your data pipeline doesn’t break.
How do you do that? Simplify your application workflow orchestration
You can try and solve the complexity with scripting. Many spend a lot of time and resources writing and maintaining scripts to ingrate it all. However, do you want your expensive data engineers spending time on operational plumbing? How scalable is this solution? Can you really guarantee that scripting will hold your data pipeline together?
Speaking to many customers, I have learned that scripting is just not good enough. It is expensive and even worse – risky. What organizations really need is a reliable product that can orchestrate their entire data pipeline – regardless of which technologies they use. No one wants automation silos and you want to be able to get end-to-end visibility of the data pipeline across disparate sources of data.
Also, as we know, nothing is more constant than change and this is very much true about data-driven projects. The various elements of a data pipelines often change, and you need to ready for this change with an orchestration solution that can handle whatever you throw at it.
BMC will be at the Strata Data conference in New York City on September 23rd through the 26th. Come and talk to us at booth 1439 to learn how to simplify your application workflow orchestration.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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