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Jun 12 2024
Mitigating Risks and Ensuring Data Integrity Through Legacy Modernization


Legacy systems are the backbone of many businesses, especially those in the industry for decades. These systems ensure a stable and reliable platform for conducting smooth business operations. However, decade-old legacy systems can also pose risks and challenges to data integrity that can affect an organization’s overall growth and success. In response to these challenges, […]

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Author: Hemanth Yamjala

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May 7 2024
Modernizing Data Architectures in the Public Sector: Challenges and Solutions

In our current digital landscape where trusted and integrated data plays an increasingly critical role for business success, the public sector is facing a significant challenge—how to modernize their data architecture to connect and share data. Strategic modernization is needed to manage the ever-growing volumes of diverse data while ensuring quality, efficient service delivery to meet the changing needs of government employees, citizens, and other stakeholders.

Relying on legacy systems in the public sector can lead to problems such as:

  • An inability to scale to meet current and future data needs
  • A lack of integration capabilities creates barriers to data sharing
  • Manual processes cause inefficiencies and increase the risk of errors
  • Limited data accessibility leads to delays in data-driven processes
  • Analysts don’t trust siloed data, hindering decision making
  • An increased risk of cybersecurity threats and breaches

To solve these challenges and foster a data-driven culture, public sector organizations must move away from antiquated technologies to a modern, agile infrastructure. This will allow every person and every application that needs timely and accurate data to easily access it.

 Embrace Hybrid Cloud Solutions as a First Step

One proven solution to data challenges is to implement hybrid cloud technologies. These technologies span third-party cloud services and on-premises infrastructure. Organizations benefit from the ultra-fast scalability, cost advantages, and efficiency of the cloud while also optimizing on-prem investments.

A hybrid approach lets organizations transition to the cloud at their own pace as part of their modernization efforts, while benefitting from apps or systems that run best on-premises. A gradual migration also helps minimize disruption and maintains data integrity.

For example, in the UK, local councils and even large government organizations are accustomed to siloed systems that require manual input and ongoing employee intervention to bring the silos together. These fragmented systems cause inefficiencies compared to modern and automated processes. This necessitates a shift to responsive systems that can handle organizations’ modern data needs.

Moving to the cloud can be complex due to legacy systems being deeply entrenched in operational processes and storing essential data. To make the migration as smooth as possible, organizations need to use a hybrid cloud data platform and work with an experienced vendor that has experience in data integration.

Make Data Integration and Data Access Completely Seamless

To be a modern and digital-first organization, public sector agencies must have the ability to integrate disparate data sources from a myriad of systems and bring data out of organizational silos. The data must then be made available to employees at all skill levels. Select data also needs to be made available to citizens and other organizations. The data can then be utilized for everything from informing decision-making to forming policies.

Modernizing systems and infrastructure can be more economical, too. Legacy systems may seem financially advantageous in the short term, but over time, maintenance costs, downtime, and barriers to using data will quickly increase the total cost of ownership (TCO). A strategic and well-executed modernization plan supported by advanced data management technologies can reduce overall operational costs, automate processes, gain public trust, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives.

Ongoing modernization efforts should include a plan to integrate advanced technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and generative AI. This helps public organizations bring together systems and technologies to build a fully connected ecosystem that makes it easy to integrate, manage, and share data, and support new use cases.

It’s worth noting that for AI and GenAI initiatives to be successful, organizations must first ensure their data is ready. This means the data is prepared and has the quality needed to drive trusted outcomes. Training an AI model on inaccurate, untrustworthy data will produce unreliable results.

Take a Future-Looking Approach to Connecting Data

A comprehensive data management strategy enables public sector organizations to predict and quickly respond to changes, make integrated data actionable, and better meet the needs of the public. Like their counterparts in the private sector, public organizations need to prioritize their modernization efforts. They also need to stay current on technological advancements and integrate the ones that meet the specific needs of their organization.

By adopting scalable, secure, and integrated data management solutions, the public sector can pave the way for a more efficient, responsive, connected, and data-driven future. Actian can help with these efforts. The Actian Data Platform allows organizations to easily connect data and build new pipelines. The platform can integrate into an organization’s existing infrastructure to meet their changing needs, including providing real-time data access at scale.

The platform simplifies today’s complex data environment by breaking down siloes, providing a unified approach to data, and bringing together data from diverse sources. In addition, the modern platform helps future-proof organizations by offering comprehensive data services spanning data integration, management, and accessibility. These capabilities facilitate a data-driven approach, enabling quick, reliable decisions across the public sector.

Our new eBook “Accelerate a Digital Transformation in the UK Public Sector” offers proven approaches to help organizations meet their need for a modern infrastructure that connects data, ensures quality, and builds trust in the data. The eBook can help the public sector achieve new levels of automation and modernization to enable intelligent growth, faster outcomes, and digital services.

The post Modernizing Data Architectures in the Public Sector: Challenges and Solutions appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Tim Williams

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Apr 30 2024
Leverage Real-Time Analytics for Smarter Decision-Making in Public Services

Consumers and citizens are accustomed to getting instant answers and results from businesses. They expect the same lightning-fast responses from the public sector, too. Likewise, employees at public sector organizations need the ability to quickly access and utilize data—including employees without advanced technical or analytics skills—to identify and address citizens’ needs.

Giving employees the information to meet citizen demand and answer their questions requires public sector organizations to capture and analyze data in real time. Real-time data supports intelligent decision making, automation, and other business-critical functions.

Easily accessible and trusted data can also increase operational effectiveness, predict risk with greater accuracy, and ultimately increase satisfaction for citizens. That data must be secure while still enabling frictionless sharing between departments for collaboration and use cases.

This naturally leads to a pressing question—How can your organization achieve real-time analytics to benefit citizens and staff alike? The answer, at a foundational level, is to implement a modern, high-performance data platform.

Make Efficient Data Utilization a Priority

Achieving a digital transformation in the public sector involves more than upgrading technology. It entails rethinking how services are delivered, how data is shared, and how your infrastructure handles current and future workloads. Too often in public service organizations, just like with their counterparts in the private sector, legacy systems are limiting the effectiveness of data.

These systems lack the scalability and integration needed to support digital transformation efforts. They also face limitations making trusted data available when and where it’s needed, including availability for real-time data analytics. Providing the data, analytics, and IT capabilities required by modern organizations is only possible with a modern and scalable data platform. This type of platform is designed to integrate systems and operations, capture and share all relevant data to predict and respond quickly to changes, and improve service delivery to citizens.

At the same time, modernization efforts that include a cloud migration can be complex. This is often due to the vast amounts of data that need to be moved to the cloud and the legacy systems entrenched in organizational processes. That’s why you need a clear and proven strategy and to work with an experienced vendor to make the transition seamless while ensuring data quality.

Meet Demand for Real-Time Analytics

Hybrid cloud data platforms have emerged as a proven solution for integrating and sharing data in the public sector. By combining on-premises infrastructure with cloud-based services, these platforms offer the flexibility, scalability, and capability to manage, integrate, and share large data volumes.

Another benefit of hybrid solutions is that they allow organizations to optimize their on-premises investments while keeping costs from spiraling out of control in the cloud—unlimited scaling in the cloud can have costs associated with it. Public sector organizations can use a hybrid platform to deliver uninterrupted service, even during peak times or critical events, while making data available in real time for analytics, apps, or other needs.

Smart decision-making demands accurate, trustworthy, and integrated data. This means that upstream, you need a platform capable of seamlessly integrating data and adding new data pipelines—without relying on IT or advanced coding.

Likewise, manual processes and IT intervention will quickly bog down an organization. For example, when a social housing team needs data from multiple systems to ensure buildings meet safety regulations, accessing and analyzing the information might take days or weeks—with no guarantee the data is trustworthy. Automating the pipelines reduces time to insights and ensures data quality measures are in place to catch errors and duplication.

Data integration is essential to breaking down data silos, providing deeper context and relevancy to data, and ensuring the most informed decisions possible. For example, central government agencies can use the data to drive national policies while identifying issues and needs, and strategically allocating resources.

Expect New Value and Use Cases with Real-Time Analytics

Moving from legacy systems to a modern platform and migrating to the cloud at a pace your organization is comfortable with enables a range of benefits:

  • Lower long-term costs and total cost of ownership (TCO)
  • Enhanced service delivery
  • Gain the trust of data users and the public
  • Have confidence in the data and analytic insights
  • Immediate scalability coupled with increased flexibility

With a solution like the Actian Data Platform, you can do even more. For example, the platform lets you easily connect, transform, and manage data. The data platform enables real-time data access at scale along with real-time analytics. Public sector organizations can benefit, for instance, by using the data to craft employee benefits programs, housing policies, tax guidelines, and other government programs.

The Actian Data Platform can integrate into your existing infrastructure and easily scale to meet changing needs. The platform makes data easy to use so you can better predict citizen needs, provide more personalized services, identify potential problems, and automate operations.

Taking a modern approach to data management, integration, and quality, along with having the ability to process, store, and analyze even large and complex data sets, allows you to digitally transform faster and be better positioned for intelligent decision making. As the public sector strives to effectively serve the needs of the public in a cost-effective, sustainable, and responsible way, data-driven decision-making will play a greater role for all stakeholders.

The path toward an effective and responsive public sector lies in the power of data and a modern data platform. Our new eBook “Accelerate a Digital Transformation in the UK Public Sector” explains why a shift from legacy technologies to a modern infrastructure is essential for today’s organizations. The eBook shares how local councils and central government organizations can balance the need to modernize with maximizing investments in current on-prem systems, meeting the changing needs of the public, and making decisions with confidence.

The post Leverage Real-Time Analytics for Smarter Decision-Making in Public Services appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Tim Williams

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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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Jan 18 2024
Digital Transformation: Modernizing Database Applications

In my previous blog on digital transformation, I wrote about the benefits of migrating mission-critical databases to the cloud. This time, I’m focusing on modernizing the applications that interact with the database. Application modernization can involve modernizing an application’s code, features, architecture and/or infrastructure. It’s a growing priority according to The 2023 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey that places it in the top 4 technology areas in spending, with 46% of organizations increasing their spend on application modernization. Further, Foundry, an IDG company, reports that 87% of its survey respondents cite modernizing critical applications as a key success driver.

7 Benefits of Database Application Modernization

Why all the recent interest in transitioning to modern applications? Application modernization and database modernization are closely intertwined processes that work together to enhance the overall agility, efficiency, performance, security, innovation, and capabilities of an organization’s business. Here’s how application modernization complements database modernization:

Accelerated Time to Market

Monolithic legacy applications are time consuming to update. Modernized applications with a loosely coupled architecture can enable faster development cycles, reducing the time it takes to bring new features or products to market. Agile development methodologies often accompany application modernization, enabling incremental and iterative development so that teams can respond rapidly to changing business requirements.

Cloud-Enabled Opportunities

Moving applications to the cloud as part of an application modernization initiative provides an extensive list of advantages over on-premises deployments, including elasticity, scalability, accessibility, business continuity, environmental sustainability, a pay-as-you-go model, and more.

Optimized User Experience

Modernizing applications offers many ways to increase user satisfaction, and productivity, including more intuitive interfaces, personalization, improved response times and better accessibility.  Multi-channel support such as mobile and web and cross-platform compatibility extend reach while advanced search and navigation, rich media incorporation, and third-party integrations add value for users.

Stronger Security and Compliance

Legacy applications built on outdated technologies may lack security features and defenses against contemporary threats and may not comply with regulatory compliance requirements. Modernizing applications allows for the implementation of the latest security measures and compliance standards, reducing the likelihood of security breaches and non-compliance.

Staff Productivity

Legacy systems can be difficult to maintain and may require significant technical resources for updates and support. Modern applications can improve staff efficiency, reduce maintenance expenses, and lead to better utilization of resources for strategic initiatives that deliver greater value to the business.

Easier Integration

Application modernization supports integration with technologies and architectural best practices that enhance interoperability, flexibility, and efficiency. Using technologies such as microservices, APIs, containers, standardized protocols, and/or cloud services, it’s easier to integrate modernized applications within complex IT environments.

Support for Innovation

Legacy applications often make it difficult to incorporate newer technologies, hindering innovation. Modernizing applications allows organizations the ability to leverage emerging technologies, such as machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) for competitive advantage.

Database Application Modernization with Ingres NeXT

In summary, database application modernization is a strategic digital transformation initiative that can help organizations stay ahead in the digital age.  However, application modernization can be expensive and risky without the right approach.

Ingres NeXt is designed to protect existing database application investments in OpenROAD while leveraging them in new ways to add value to your business, without costly and lengthy rewrites. Flexible options to modernize your OpenROAD applications include:

  • ABF and Forms-Based Applications – Modernize ABF applications to OpenROAD frames using the abf2or migration utility and extend converted applications to mobile and web applications.
  • OpenROAD and Workbench IDE – Migrate partitioned ABF applications to OpenROAD frames.
  • OpenROAD Server – Deploy applications securely in the OpenROAD Server to retain and use application business logic.

In addition, The Ingres NeXt Readiness Assessment offers a pre-defined set of professional services that can lower your risk for application modernization and increase your confidence for a successful cloud journey. The service is designed to assist you with understanding the requirements to modernize Ingres and ABF or OpenROAD applications and to impart recommendations important to your modernization strategy formulation, planning, and implementation.

The post Digital Transformation: Modernizing Database Applications appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Teresa Wingfield

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Jun 1 2023
Using Data to Improve Your ROI Just Got Easier!

Are your data analytics providing a positive return on investment (ROI) for your organization? Unfortunately, the answer may be no because the data isn’t offering enough value, meaning that it isn’t positively impacting business outcomes. Too often, data platforms are information graveyards. This may sound harsh, but Forrester estimates that less than 0.5% of all data is ever analyzed and used. It also estimates that if the typical Fortune 1000 business were able to increase data accessibility by 10%, it would generate more than $65 million in additional net income.

You should and can turn this around. Delivering the right data, at the right time and in the right context will make it easier to use data to improve your ROI. Here are some pointers to help you get started.

Deliver the Right Data

You can’t improve business outcomes unless you ask your users what data they really need. You’re likely to get an extensive list of requests, so you should also find out what key performance indicators (KPIs) and other methods users apply to measure their success. This will provide a way for you to prioritize data that will help users meet their goals. Also, try to understand issues that are preventing users from getting the insights they need, including factors such as usability, data quality, and accessibility.

Deliver Data at the Right Time

Organizations with traditional data analytics, data warehousing, business intelligence, and data management processes often take weeks to respond to requests for the right data. As a result, current data isn’t available when users need it for decision-making. Real-time data analytics helps organizations deliver data in a manner that improves situational awareness as change is happening, and thus empowers them to decide on the best courses of action at the moment.

Deliver Data in the Right Context

Analytics embedded within day-to-day tools and applications deliver data in the right context, allowing users in sales, marketing, finance, and other departments to make better decisions faster. According to Gartner, context-driven analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) models will replace 60% of existing models built on traditional data, by 2025. 

The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform Improves ROI

The Actian Data platform is the ideal solution for making it easy to deliver the right data, at the right time and in the right context.

REAL-Real Time Analytics: The Avalanche platform is able to not only update data in the instant that it changes but does so in a way that does not impact the performance of other workloads or queries. While other technologies claim real-time analytics, their data updates always impact query performance. Thus, they deliver “near” real-time or “human” real-time…but never REAL real-time. If you need TRUE real-time insights –at the moment they matter– you need the Avalanche Platform.

Embedded Analytics: The Avalanche platform includes a scalable connectivity framework, a lightweight embeddable runtime engine, a low-code development environment, and ready-to-use APIs to deliver embedded analytics quickly.

Native Integration:  In addition, the Avalanche Platform includes integration. This means you can work with one vendor to solve multiple problems: integrating data from any source to any target, transforming it along the way with profiling and cleansing via automation and orchestration, and delivering real-time analytics. One-stop shopping with the Avalanche Platform saves you headaches with procurement, simplifies your ecosystem and gets you results faster.

The post Using Data to Improve Your ROI Just Got Easier! appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Teresa Wingfield

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Apr 21 2023
6 Things You Must Know About Data Modernization

Data is the heart of digital transformation and the digital+ economy. Data modernization moves data from siloed legacy systems to the digital world to help organizations optimize their use of data as a strategic asset. For a successful data modernization journey, the following are some important things you need to know: 

#1. Data Strategy 

A data strategy lays out your plan to improve how your business acquires, stores, manages, uses, and shares data. The creation of a strategy, according to McKinsey, ranks as the top reason for companies’ success in data and analytics. Your data strategy should include your vision, business objectives, use cases, goals, and ways to measure success. 

#2. Data Architecture and Technologies 

To improve access to information that empowers “next best action” decisions, you will need to transfer your data from outdated or siloed legacy databases in your on-premises data center to a modern cloud data platform. Gartner says that more than 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025 and will not be able to fully execute their digital strategies without the use of cloud-native architectures and technologies. For successful data modernization, your cloud data platform must be a cloud-native solution in order to provide the scalability, elasticity, resiliency, automation, and accessibility needed to accelerate cycles of innovation and support real-time data-driven decisions.  

#3. Data Analytics 

Another important part of data modernization is data analytics. Traditional business tools aren’t enough to support modern data needs. Advanced analytics such as predictive modeling, statistical methods, and machine learning are needed to forecast trends and predict events. Further, embedding analytics directly within applications and tools helps users better understand and use data since it’s in the context of their work.    

#4. Data Quality 

Quality matters a lot in data modernization because users who rely on data to help them make important business decisions need to know that they can trust its integrity. Data should be accurate, complete, consistent, reliable, and up-to-date. A collaborative approach to data quality across the organization increases knowledge sharing and transparency regarding how data is stored and used.   

#5. Data Security 

Strong data security is the foundation for protecting modern cloud data platforms. It includes safeguards and countermeasures to prevent, detect, counteract, or minimize security risks. In addition to security controls to keep your data safe, including user authentication, access control, role separation, and encryption, you’ll need to protect cloud services using isolation, a single tenant architecture, a key management service, federated identity/single sign-on, and end-to-end data encryption.  

#6. Data Governance 

Data governance determines the appropriate storage, use, handling, and availability of data. As your data modernization initiative democratizes data, you’ll need to protect privacy, comply with regulations, and ensure ethical use. This requires fine-grained techniques to prevent inappropriate access to personally identifiable information (PII), sensitive personal information, and commercially sensitive data, while still allowing visibility to data attributes a worker needs. 

Make Modernization Easier 

 Your modernization journey depends on a cloud data platform that eliminates internal data silos and supports cloud-native technologies. You’ll also need to choose the right data analytics tools, ensure that your data is trustworthy and implement solid data and cloud security and data governance. The Avalanche Cloud Data Platform can help make your digital transformation easier with proven data integration, data management, and data analytics services. Learn more about how the Avalanche Cloud Data platform accelerates data modernization so you can deliver today while building your digital future.  

The post 6 Things You Must Know About Data Modernization appeared first on Actian.


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Author: Teresa Wingfield

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