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Mar 20 2024
Migrate Your Mission-Critical Database to the Cloud with Confidence

Is your company contemplating moving its mission-critical database to the cloud? If so, you may have concerns around the cloud’s ability to provide the performance, security, and privacy required to adequately support your database applications. Fortunately, it’s a new day in cloud computing that allows you to migrate to the cloud with confidence! Here are some things to keep in mind that will bring you peace of mind for cloud migration.

Optimized Performance

You may enjoy faster database performance in the cloud. Cloud service providers (CSPs) offer varying processing power, memory, and storage capacity options to meet your most demanding workload performance requirements. Frequently accessed data can be stored in high-speed caches closer to users, minimizing latency and improving response times. Load balancers distribute processing across servers within the cloud infrastructure to prevent server overload and bottlenecks. Some CSPs also have sophisticated monitoring tools to track resource usage and identify performance bottlenecks.

Enhanced Security

Data isn’t necessarily more secure in your on-premises data center than in the cloud. This is because CSPs invest heavily in advanced security controls to protect their infrastructure and have deep security expertise. They constantly update and patch their systems, often addressing vulnerabilities faster than on-premises deployments. Some CSPs also offer free vulnerability scanning and penetration testing.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that you are also responsible for security in the cloud. The Shared Responsibility Model (SRM) is a cloud security approach that states that CSPs are responsible for securing their service infrastructure and customers are responsible for securing their data and applications within the cloud environment. This includes tasks such as:

    • Patching and updating software
    • Properly configuring security settings
    • Implementing adequate access controls
    • Managing user accounts and permissions

Improved Compliance

Organizations with strict data privacy requirements have understandably been reluctant to operate their mission-critical databases with sensitive data in the cloud. But with the right CSP and the right approach, it is possible to implement a compliant cloud strategy. CSPs offer infrastructure and services built to comply with a wide range of global security and compliance standards such as GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and others, including data sovereignty requirements:

Data Residency Requirements: You can choose among data center locations for where to store your data to meet compliance mandates. Some CSPs can prevent data copies from being moved outside of a location.

Data Transfer Requirements: These include the legal and regulatory rules that oversee how personal data can be moved across different jurisdictions, organizations, or systems. CSPs often offer pre-approved standard contractual clauses (SCCs) and support Binding Corporate Rules (BCRs) to serve compliance purposes for data transfers. Some CSPs let their customers control and monitor their cross-border data transfers.

Sovereign Controls: Some CSPs use hardware-based enclaves to ensure complete data isolation.

Additionally, many CSPs, as well as database vendors, offer features to help customers with compliance requirements to protect sensitive data. These include:

  • Data encryption at rest and in transit protects data from unauthorized access
  • Access controls enforce who can access and modify personal data
  • Data masking and anonymization de-identify data while still allowing analysis
  • Audit logging: tracks data access and activity for improved accountability.

Microsoft Cloud for Sovereignty provides additional layers of protection through features like Azure Confidential Computing. This technology utilizes hardware-based enclaves to ensure even Microsoft cannot access customer data in use.

Cloud Migration Made Easy

Ingres NeXt delivers low-risk database migration from traditional environments to modern cloud platforms with web and mobile client endpoints. Since no two journeys to the cloud are identical, Actian provides the infrastructure and tooling required to take customers to the cloud regardless of what their planned journey may look like.

Here are additional articles on database modernization benefits and challenges that you may find helpful:

The post Migrate Your Mission-Critical Database to the Cloud with Confidence appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Teresa Wingfield

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Feb 29 2024
How to Easily Add Modern User Interfaces to Your Database Applications

Modernizing legacy database applications brings all the advantages of the cloud alongside benefits such as faster development, user experience optimization, staff efficiency, stronger security and compliance, and improved interoperability. In my first blog on legacy application modernization with OpenROAD, a rapid database application development tool, I drilled into the many ways it makes it easier to modernize applications with low risk by retaining your existing business logic. However, there’s still another big part of the legacy modernization journey, the user experience.

Users expect modern, intuitive interfaces with rich features and responsive design. Legacy applications often lack these qualities, which can often require significant redesign and redevelopment during application modernization to meet modern user experience expectations. Not so with OpenROAD! It simplifies the process of creating modern, visually appealing user interfaces by providing developers with a range of tools and features discussed below.

The abf2or Migration Utility

The abf2or migration utility modernizes Application-By-Forms (ABF) applications to OpenROAD frames, including form layout, controls, properties, and event handlers. It migrates business logic implemented in ABF scripts to equivalent logic in OpenROAD. This may involve translating script code and ensuring compatibility with OpenROAD’s scripting language. The utility also handles the migration of data sources to ensure that data connections and queries function properly and can convert report definitions.

WebGen

WebGen is an OpenROAD utility that lets you quickly generate web and mobile applications in HTML5 and JavaScript from OpenROAD frames allowing OpenROAD applications to deployed on-line and on mobile devices.    

OpenROAD and Workbench IDE 

The OpenROAD Workbench Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a comprehensive toolset for software development, particularly for creating and maintaining applications built using the OpenROAD framework. It provides tools specifically designed to migrate partitioned ABF applications to OpenROAD frames. Developers can then use the IDE’s visual design tools to further refine and customize the programs.   

Platform and Device Compatibility

Multiple platform support, including Windows and Linux, lets developers create user interfaces that can run seamlessly across different operating systems without significant modification. Developers can deliver applications to a desktop or place them on a web server for web browser access; OpenROAD installs them automatically if not already installed. The runtime for Windows Mobile enables deploying OpenROAD applications to mobile phones and Pocket PC devices.

Visual Development Environment

OpenROAD provides a visual development environment where developers can design user interface components using drag-and-drop tools, visual editors, and wizards. This makes it easier for developers to create complex user interface layouts without writing extensive code manually.   

Component Library

OpenROAD offers a rich library of pre-built user interface components, such as buttons, menus, dialog boxes, and data grids. Developers can easily customize and integrate these components into applications, saving time and user interface design effort.

Integration with Modern Technologies

Integration with modern technologies and frameworks such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript allows developers to incorporate modern user interface design principles, such as responsive design and animations, into their applications.

Scalability and Performance

OpenROAD delivers scalable and high-performance user interfaces capable of handling large volumes of data and complex interactions. It optimizes resource utilization and minimizes latency, ensuring a smooth and responsive user experience.

Modernize Your OpenROAD applications

Your legacy database applications may be stable, but most will not meet the expectations of users who want modern user interfaces. You don’t have to settle for the status quo. OpenROAD makes it easy to deliver what your users are asking for with migration tools to convert older interfaces, visual design tools, support for web and mobile application development, an extensive library of pre-built user interface components, and much more.

The post How to Easily Add Modern User Interfaces to Your Database Applications appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Teresa Wingfield

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Feb 6 2024
Data Processing Across Hybrid Environments Is Important, Analysts Say

Would you be surprised to know that by 2026, eight in 10 enterprises will have data spread across multiple cloud providers and on-premises data centers? This prediction by Ventana Research’s Matt Aslett is based, at least in part, on the trend of organizations increasingly using more than one cloud service in addition to their on-premises infrastructure.

Optimizing all of this data—regardless of where it lives—requires a modern data platform capable of accessing and managing data in hybrid environments. “As such, there is a growing requirement for cloud-agnostic data platforms, both operational and analytic, that can support data processing across hybrid IT and multi-cloud environments,” Aslett explains.

For many organizations, managing data while ensuring quality in any environment is a struggle. New data sources are constantly emerging and data volumes are growing at unprecedented rates. When you couple this with an increase in the number of data-intensive applications and analysts who need quality data, it’s easy to see why data management is more complex but more necessary than ever before.

As organizations are finding, data management and data quality problems can and will scale—challenges, silos, and inefficient data processes that exist on-premises or in one cloud will compound as you migrate across multiple clouds or hybrid infrastructures. That’s why it’s essential to fix those issues now and implement effective data management strategies that can scale with you. 

Replacing Complexity with Simplicity

Ventana research also says that traditional approaches to data processing rely on a complex and often “brittle” architecture. This type of architecture uses a variety of specialized products cobbled together from multiple vendors, which in turn require specialized skill sets to use effectively.

As additional technologies are bolted onto the architecture, processes and data sharing become even more complex. In fact, one problem we see at Actian is that organizations continue to add new data and analytics products into ecosystems that are bogged down with legacy technologies. This creates a complicated tech stack of disparate tools, programming languages, frameworks, and technologies that create barriers to integrating, managing, and sharing data.

For a company to be truly data-driven, data must be easily accessible and trusted by every analyst and data user across the enterprise. Any obstacles to tapping into new data sources or accessing quality data, such as requiring ongoing IT help, encourage data silos, and shadow IT—common problems that can lead to misinformed decision-making and will cause stakeholders to lose confidence in the data.

A modern data platform that makes data easy to access, share, and trust with 100% confidence is needed to encourage data use, automate processes, inform decisions, and feed data-intensive applications. The platform should also deliver high performance and be cost-effective to appeal to everyone from data scientists and analysts who use the data to the CFO who’s focused on the IT budget.

Manageability and Usability Are Critical Platform Capabilities

Today’s data-driven environment demands an easy-to-use cloud data platform. Choosing the best platform to meet your business and IT needs can be tricky. Recognized industry analyst research can help by identifying important platform capabilities and identifying which vendors lead in those categories.

For example, Ventana Research’s “Data Platforms Value Index” is an assessment you can use to evaluate vendors and products. One capability the assessment evaluated is product manageability, which is how well the product can be managed technologically and by the business, and how well it can be governed, secured, licensed, and supported in a service level agreement (SLA).

The assessment also looked at the usability of the product—how well it meets the various business needs of executives, management, workers, analysts, IT, and others. “The importance of usability and the digital experience in software utilization has been increasing and is evident in our market research over the last decade,” the assessment notes. “The requirements to meet a broad set of roles and responsibilities across an organization’s cohorts and personas should be a priority for all vendors.”

The Actian Data Platform ranked second for manageability and third for usability, which reflects the platform’s ease of use by making data easy to connect, manage, and analyze. These key capabilities are must-haves for data-driven companies.

Cut Prep Time While Boosting Data Quality

According to Ventana Research, 69% of organizations cite data prep as consuming the most time in analytics initiatives, followed by reviewing data for quality issues at 64%. This is consistent with what we hear from our customers

This is due to data silos, data quality concerns, IT dependency, data latency, and not knowing the steps to optimize data to intelligently grow the business. Organizations must remove these barriers to go from data to decision with confidence and ease.

The Actian Data Platform’s native data integration capabilities can help. It allows you to easily unify data from different sources to gain a comprehensive and accurate understanding of all data, allowing for better decision-making, analysis, and reporting. The platform supports any source and target data, offers elastic integration and cloud-automated scaling, and provides tools for data integration management in hybrid environments.

You benefit from codeless API and application integration, flexible design capabilities, integration templates, and the ability to customize and re-use integrations. Our integration also includes data profiling capabilities for reliable decision-making and a comprehensive library of pre-built connectors.

The platform is unique in its ability to collect, manage, and analyze data in real-time with its transactional database, data integration, data quality, and data warehouse capabilities. It manages data from any public cloud, multi- or hybrid cloud, and on-premises environments through a single pane of glass. In addition, the platform offers self-service data integration, which lowers costs and addresses multiple use cases, without needing multiple products.

As Ventana Research’s Matt Aslett noted in his analyst perspective, our platform reduces the number of tools and platforms needed to generate data insights. Streamlining tools is essential to making data easy and accessible to all users, at all skill levels. Aslett also says, “I recommend that all organizations that seek to deliver competitive advantage using data should evaluate Actian and explore the potential benefits of unified data platforms.”

At Actian, we agree. That’s why I encourage you to experience the Actian Data Platform for yourself or join us at upcoming industry events to connect with us in person.

The post Data Processing Across Hybrid Environments Is Important, Analysts Say appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Actian Corporation

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Jan 10 2024
7 Reasons to Move Mission-Critical Databases to the Cloud

Digital transformation refers to the integration and application of digital technologies, processes, and strategies across an organization to fundamentally improve how it operates and delivers value to its customers, the business, and others. It involves leveraging digital tools, data, and technologies to automate business processes, improve customer experiences, drive innovation, and support data-driven decision-making.

The adoption and growth of digital transformation are massive, according to Statista Research. “In 2022, digital transformation spending reached USD 1.6 trillion. By 2026, global spending on digital transformation is anticipated to reach USD 3.4 trillion.” A recent Gartner study reported that digital change is an organizational priority for 87% of senior executives and CIOs, requiring additional focus on data modernization.

Why Move Mission-Critical Databases to the Cloud?

Which digital transformation project(s) to pursue depends on your specific situation and goals to ensure successful outcomes. Moving mission-critical databases to the cloud is an untapped opportunity for many organizations, and it can offer tremendous advantages if they do not face compliance and confidentiality restrictions for cloud use or do not have complex legacy entanglements that make moving too hard. Explore these key benefits of cloud migration:

#1. Faster Business Agility: The cloud removes the need for infrastructure procurement, setup, management, and maintenance. Cloud migration helps organizations respond quickly to market changes, customer demands, and competitive pressures by quickly scaling to meet business needs. This agility can lead to a competitive advantage in dynamic industries.

#2. On-Demand Scalability: Cloud elasticity is useful in environments that require the ability to scale storage and compute up or down to match demand. Cloud-native deployments that offer cloud elasticity can ensure optimal performance even during peak usage periods, such as retail during busy holiday shopping or government at tax time.

#3. Greater Sustainability: The shared infrastructure of cloud providers allows for better economies of scale because they can distribute the cost of data centers, cooling systems, and other resources efficiently among many customers. And, instead of over-provisioning infrastructure in their own data center to handle occasional spikes in demand, organizations can dynamically adjust resources in the cloud, minimizing waste.

#4. Optimized User Experience: Regional data centers of cloud providers allow organizations to host databases closer to end users for better performance, responsiveness, and availability of applications. This is especially useful when low latency and quick data access are critical, such as electronic commerce, online gaming, live streaming, and interactive web applications.

#5. Stronger Security and Compliance: Major cloud providers invest significantly in physical security, network security, and data center protections that should keep mission-critical databases safe, provided organizations adhere to best practices for implementation and security. In addition, cloud providers often offer compliance certifications for various regulatory standards that can help simplify the process of adhering to industry regulations and requirements.

#6. Improved Backup and Recovery: The cloud allows organizations to create backups and implement disaster recovery more efficiently. This is crucial for safeguarding mission-critical data against unforeseen events such as data corruption, cyber-attacks, and natural disasters.

#7. Staff Optimization: Many database vendors offer managed or co-managed services in the cloud. These may include taking care of tasks such as provisioning, scaling, hardware maintenance, software patches, upgrades, backups, query optimization, table and index management, application tuning, and more. This leaves teams more time to focus on strategic initiatives with higher business value.

How Actian Supports Migration of Mission-Critical Databases to the Cloud

Actian recognizes that mission-critical database migration to the cloud represents one of the most exciting digital transformation opportunities, making a high impact on business agility, scalability, sustainability, data protection, and staff optimization. This is why we developed the Ingres NeXt Initiative to provide businesses with flexible options for infrastructure, software, and management of the Ingres database or Actian X running on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services. Our cloud migration approach minimizes risk, protects business logic, lowers costs, reduces time and effort, and decreases business disruption.

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Author: Teresa Wingfield

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Aug 29 2023
5 Strategies for Data Migration in Healthcare

All data-driven businesses need to migrate their data at some point, whether it’s to the cloud, a sophisticated data management system like a data warehouse, or applications. In some instances, the data migration process can entail changing the data’s format or type to make it more usable, increase performance, make it easier to store, or for other reasons.

In healthcare, data migration is the essential process of transferring data, including patient data, between systems in a secure way that meets compliance requirements, such as those set by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Data migration can include moving information from a data platform or legacy system to a modern electronic health records (EHR) system that makes a patient’s medical information readily available to healthcare providers in any location.

Healthcare data is often complex, has extensive data sets, and must be secure to protect patient privacy. Here are five ways healthcare organizations can successfully migrate data:

1. Have a detailed data migration plan

This critical first step will guide and inform the entire migration. The plan should identify where healthcare data currently resides, where it needs to go, and how it’s going to get there. You’ll need to determine if this will be a full migration, which entails moving all data to a new system, like migrating on-premises data to the cloud or modernizing by moving data from a legacy patient records system to a new platform or EHR system.

Or, the migration can be done in phases over time, with the option for some data to stay in its current location or in a hybrid environment with some data in the cloud and some on-premises. The migration plan must include steps, timeframes, and responsibilities, along with identifying the tools and expertise needed to move the data. Migration tools can automate some processes for increased efficiency and to reduce the chance for manual errors.

2. Assess the data you’ll be migrating

You’ll need to identify all the sources containing the data that needs to be migrated. This includes databases, files, and applications that have healthcare data. You should consider converting paper medical records to EHRs, which allows the data to be integrated for a complete patient record that’s available whenever and wherever a healthcare provider needs it. Once you know which information will be migrated and where it’s stored, the next step is to assess the data. This step determines if the data needs to be standardized or transformed to meet the new system’s requirements.

3. Understand and follow compliance requirements

Healthcare is heavily regulated, which impacts data usage. You must ensure security and compliance when migrating healthcare data. This includes compliance with HIPAA and any other applicable local or state requirements. You may need to use data encryption processes and secure channels when transferring the data to ensure sensitive patient data, such as protected health information (PHI), is secure.

As part of your data migration plan, you’ll need to consider how data is protected when it’s stored, including in cloud storage. The plan may require boosting security measures to mitigate cybersecurity threats. Conducting a risk assessment can help identify any vulnerabilities or potential risks so you can resolve them before moving your data.

4. Ensure data is in the correct format

Data must be in the proper format for the destination location. Some healthcare systems require data to be in a particular format or structure, which could require converting the data—without losing any of the details. Ensuring data is formatted correctly entails mapping the data, which helps you determine how information in the current system corresponds to requirements for the new system. Data mapping helps make sure different systems, apps, and databases can seamlessly share data by showing the relationships of data elements in the different systems. Mapping also helps ensure data is properly transformed before the migration, allowing it to be easily ingested and integrated with other data.

5. Check for data quality issues

Any data quality problems, such as incomplete or missing information, will be migrated along with the data. That’s why it’s important to fix any problems now—correct errors, eliminate duplicate records, and make sure your data is accurate, timely, and complete before moving it. Data cleansing can give you confidence in your healthcare data. Likewise, implementing a data quality management program is one way to keep data clean and accurate. After the migration, data should be checked to ensure details were not lost or inadvertently changed in transit and to verify the data quality. Testing the data post-migration is essential to ensure it meets your usability requirements and the new system is performing properly.

Healthcare Data Requires a Comprehensive Migration Strategy

Actian can help healthcare providers and other organizations create and implement a detailed data management strategy to meet their particular needs. We can also make sure your data is secure, yet easy to use and readily available to those who need it. We’ll help you migrate data for cloud storage, data protection, healthcare data analytics, or other business goals. With the Actian Data Platform, you can easily build data pipelines to current and new data sources, and easily connect, manage, and analyze data to drive insights and prevent data silos.

Related resources you may find useful:

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Author: Saquondria Burris

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Jul 24 2023
De-Risking The Road to Cloud: 6 Questions to Ask Along the Way

In my career, I’ve had first-hand experience as both a user and a chooser of data analytics technology, and have also had the chance to talk with countless customers about their data analytics journey to the cloud. With some reflection, I’ve distilled the learnings down to 6 key questions that every technology and business leader should ask themselves to avoid pitfalls along the way to the cloud so they can achieve its full promise.

1. What is my use case?

Identifying your starting point is the critical first step of any cloud migration. The most successful cloud migrations within our customer base are associated with a specific use case. This focused approach puts boundaries around the migration, articulates the desired output, and enables you to know what success looks like. Once a single use case has been migrated to the cloud, the next one is easier and often relies on data that has already been moved.

2. How will we scale over time?

Once you’ve identified the use case, you’ll need to determine what scaling looks like for your company. The beauty of the cloud is that it’s limitless in its scalability; however, businesses do have limits. Without planning for scale, businesses run the risk of exceeding resources and timelines.

To scale quickly and maximize value, I always recommend customers evaluate use cases based on level of effort and business value: plotting each use case in a 2Ă—2 matrix will help you identify the low effort, high value areas to focus on. By planning ahead for scale, you de-risk the move to the cloud because you understand what lies ahead.

3. What moves, what doesn’t, and what’s the cost of not planning for a hybrid multi-cloud implementation?

We hear from our customers, especially those in Europe, that there is a need to be deliberate and methodical in selecting the data that moves to the cloud. Despite the availability of data masking, encryption, and other protective measures available, concerns about GDPR and privacy are still very real. These factors need to be considered as the cloud migration roadmap is developed.

Multi-cloud architectures create resiliency, address regulatory requirements, and help avoid the risk of vendor lock-in. The benefits of multi-cloud environments were emphasized in a recent meeting with one of our EMEA-based retail customers. They experienced significant lost revenue and reputation damage after an outage of one of the largest global cloud service providers. The severe impact of this singular outage made them rethink a single cloud strategy and move to multi-cloud as part of their recovery plan.

4. How do I control costs?

In our research on customers’ move to the cloud, we found that half of organizations today are demanding better cost transparency, visibility, and planning capabilities. Businesses want a simple interface or console to determine which workloads are running and which need to be stopped – the easier this is to see and control, the better. Beyond visibility in the control console, our customers also use features such as idle stop, idle sleep, auto-scaling, and warehouse scheduling to manage costs. Every company should evaluate product performance and features carefully to drive the best cost model for the business. In fact, we’ve seen our health insurance customers leverage performance to control costs and increase revenue.

5. What skills gaps will I need to plan for, and how will I address them?

Our customers are battling skills gaps in key areas, including cloud, data engineering, and data science. Fifty percent of organizations lack the cloud skills to migrate effectively to the cloud, and 45 percent of organizations struggle with data integration capacity and challenges, according to our research. Instead of upskilling a team, which can often be a slow and painful process, lean on the technology and take advantage of as-a-service offerings. We’ve seen customers that engage in services agreements take advantage of platform co-management arrangements, fully managed platform services, and outsourcing to help offset skills gap challenges.

6. How will I measure success?

Look beyond cost and measure success based on the performance for the business. Ask yourself: is your cloud solution solving the problem you set out to solve? One of our customers, Met Eireann, the meteorological service for Ireland, determined that query speed was a critical KPI to measure. They found after moving to the cloud that performance improved 60-600 times and reduced query result time down to less than a second. Every customer measures success differently, whether it’s operational KPIs, customer experience, or data monetization. But whatever the measure, make sure you define success early and measure it often.

Making the move to the cloud is a journey, not a single step. Following a deliberate path, guided by these key questions, can help you maximize the value of cloud, while minimizing risk and disruption. With the right technology partner and planning, you can pave a smooth road to the cloud for your organization and realize true business value from your data.

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Author: Jennifer Jackson

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May 25 2023
How to Use Cloud Migration as an Opportunity to Modernize Data and Analytics

Ensuring a hassle-free cloud migration takes a lot of planning and working with the right vendor. While you have specific goals that you want to achieve by moving to the cloud, you can also benefit the business by thinking about how you want to expand and optimize the cloud once you’ve migrated. For example, the cloud journey can be the optimal time to modernize your data and analytics.

Organizations are turning to the cloud for a variety of reasons, such as gaining scalability, accelerating innovation, and integrating data from traditional and new sources. While there’s a lot of talk about the benefits of the cloud—and there are certainly many advantages—it’s also important to realize that challenges can occur both during and after migration.

Identify and Solve Cloud Migration Challenges

New research based on surveys of 450 business and IT leaders identified some of the common data and analytics challenges organizations face when migrating to the cloud. They include data privacy, regulatory compliance, ethical data use concerns, and the ability to scale.

One way you can solve these challenges is to deploy a modern cloud data platform that can deliver data integration, scalability, and advanced analytics capabilities. The right platform can also solve another common problem you might experience in your cloud migration—operationalizing as you add more data sources, data pipelines, and analytics use cases.

You need the ability to quickly add new data sources, build pipelines with or without using code, perform analytics at scale, and meet other business needs in a cloud or hybrid environment. A cloud data platform can deliver these capabilities, along with enabling you to easily manage, access, and use data—without ongoing IT assistance.

Use the Cloud for Real-Time Analytics

Yesterday’s analytics approaches won’t deliver the rapid insights you need for today’s advanced automation, most informed decision-making, and the ability to identify emerging trends as they happen to shape product and service offerings. That’s one reason why real-time data analytics is becoming more mainstream.

According to research conducted for Actian, common technologies operational in the cloud include data streaming and real-time analytics, data security and privacy, and data integration. Deploying these capabilities with an experienced cloud data platform vendor can help you avoid problems that other organizations routinely face, such as cloud migrations that don’t meet established objectives or not having transparency into costs, resulting in budget overruns.

Vendor assessments are also important. Companies evaluating vendors often look at the functionality and capabilities offered, the business understanding and personalization of the sales process, and IT efficiency and user experience. A vendor handling your cloud migration should help you deploy the environment that’s best for your business, such as a multi-cloud or hybrid approach, without being locked into a specific cloud service provider.

Once organizations are in the cloud, they are implementing a variety of use cases. The most popular ones, according to research for Actian, include customer 360 and customer analytics, financial risk management, and supply chain and inventory optimization. With a modern cloud data platform, you can bring almost any use case to the cloud.

Drive Transformational Insights Using a Cloud Data Platform

Moving to the cloud can help you modernize both the business and IT. As highlighted in our new eBook “The Top Data and Analytics Capabilities Every Modern Business Should Have,” your cloud migration journey is an opportunity to optimize and expand the use of data and analytics in the cloud. The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform can help. The platform makes it easy for you to connect, manage, and analyze data in the cloud. It also offers superior price performance, and you can use your preferred tools and languages to get answers from your data. Read the eBook to find out more about our research, the top challenges organizations face with cloud migrations, and how to eliminate IT bottlenecks. You’ll also find out how your peers are using cloud platforms for analytics and the best practices for smooth cloud migration.

Related resources you may find useful:

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Author: Brett Martin

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May 4 2023
How Your Peers are Experiencing their Journeys to the Cloud

According to new customer research from Actian, “Data Analytics Journey to the Cloud,” over 70% of companies are mandating that all new data analytics applications must use cloud-based platforms. Our research reveals many good reasons why the rush to the cloud is on. It also shows that organizations can run into cloud migration roadblocks, that prevent them from realizing the full potential of running their data analytics in the cloud.

Read our eBook to get insights from 450 business and technical leaders across industries and company sizes to improve your chances of a smoother cloud journey. Here are a few highlights of what these leaders shared on their cloud migration:

  • Over 60% of companies measure the impact of data analytics on their business.
  • Data privacy is the top challenge facing companies transitioning to the cloud.
  • More than half of companies say that scaling their business growth is a major challenge and are using cloud-based data analytics to address this.
  • Customer 360 customer analytics is the leading use case for companies.
  • Over 50% of companies are using cloud-based analytics to measure and improve customer experience key performance indicators (KPIs).
  • More than half of companies use data analytics to address their talent challenges.
  • Over 50% of companies use cloud-based data analytics to impact their employee experience and talent management KPIs.

Making your Cloud Migration Easier

Our research provides additional details that can help you become more confident in your cloud migration, improve planning, and better leverage cloud resources by understanding how other organizations approach their migration. If you’re already in a cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid environment, you can use insights in our eBook to modernize applications, business processes, and data analytics in the cloud.

Register for our eBook to find out more about:

  • Leading Drivers of Cloud Transitions
  • Data Analytics Challenges and Cloud Migration Friction Points
  • Top Cloud-Native Technologies in Operation
  • Most Common Real-World Analytics Use Cases
  • How to Deliver New Capabilities.

You might also want to sign up for a free trial of the Avalanche Cloud Data Platform. You’ll discover how this modern platform simplifies how you connect, manage, and analyze your data.

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Author: Teresa Wingfield

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Mar 17 2023
Data Analytics for Supply Chain Managers

If you haven’t already seen Astrid Eira’s article in FinancesOnline, “14 Supply Chain Trends for 2022/2023: New Predictions To Watch Out For”, I highly recommend it for insights into current supply chain developments and challenges. Eira identifies analytics as the top technology priority in the supply chain industry, with 62% of organizations reporting limited visibility. Here are some of Eira’s trends related to supply chain analytics use cases and how the Avalanche Cloud Data Platform provides the modern foundation needed to make it easier to support complex supply chain analytics requirements.

Supply Chain Sustainability

According to Eira, companies are expected to make their supply chains more eco-friendly. This means that companies will need to leverage supplier data and transportation data, and more in real-time to enhance their environmental, social and governance (ESG) efforts. With better visibility into buildings, transportation, and production equipment, not only can businesses build a more sustainable chain, but they can also realize significant cost savings through greater efficiency.

With built-in integration, management and analytics, the Avalanche Cloud Data Platform helps companies easily aggregate and analyze massive amounts of supply chain data to gain data-driven insights for optimizing their ESG initiatives.

The Supply Chain Control Tower

Eira believes that the supply chain control tower will become more important as companies adopt Supply Chain as a Service (SCaaS) and outsource more supply chain functions. As a result, smaller in-house teams will need the assistance of a supply chain control tower to provide an end-to-end view of the supply chain. A control tower captures real-time operational data from across the supply chain to improve decision making.

The Avalanche platform helps deliver this end-to-end visibility. It can serve as a single source of truth from sourcing to delivery for all supply chain partners. Users can see and adapt to changing demand and supply scenarios across the world and resolve critical issues in real time. In addition to fast information delivery using the cloud, the Avalanche Cloud Data Platform can embed analytics within day-to-day supply chain management tools and applications to deliver data in the right context, allowing the supply chain management team to make better decisions faster.

Edge to Cloud

Eira also points out the increasing use of Internet of Things (IoT) technology in the supply chain to track shipments and deliveries, provide visibility into production and maintenance, and spot equipment problems faster. These IoT trends indicate the need for edge to cloud where data is generated at the edge, stored, processed, and analyzed in the cloud.

The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform is uniquely capable of delivering comprehensive edge to cloud capabilities in a single solution. It includes Zen, an embedded database suited to applications that run on edge devices, with zero administration and small footprint requirements. The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform transforms, orchestrates, and stores Zen data for analysis.

Artificial Intelligence

Another trend Eira discusses is the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) for supply chain automation. For example, companies use predictive analytics to forecast demand based on historical data. This helps them adjust production, inventory levels, and improve sales and operations planning processes.

The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform is ideally suited for AI with the following capabilities:

  1. Supports rapid machine learning model training and retraining on fresh data.
  2. Scales to several hundred terabytes of data to analyze large data sets instead of just using data samples or subsets of data.
  3. Allows a model and scoring data to be in the same database, reducing the time and effort that data movement would require.
  4. Gives data scientists a wide range of tools and libraries to solve their challenges.

This discussion of supply chain sustainability, the supply chain control tower, edge to cloud, and AI just scratch the surface of what’s possible with supply chain analytics. To learn more about how the Avalanche Cloud Data Platform, contact our data analytics experts. Here’s some additional material if you would like to learn more:

·      The Power of Real-time Supply Chain Analytics

·      Actian for Manufacturing

·      Embedded Database Use Cases

The post Data Analytics for Supply Chain Managers appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Teresa Wingfield

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