To supercharge your data, focus on infrastructure readiness

Ready to unlock the power of your data to derive business outcomes? Excellent. But first, let's spend a little time talking about your data infrastructure—and its relationship to the cloud.

It starts with the assumption that you're going to need to handle a high volume and a large variety of data from multiple sources. If that's the case, you're going to need a modern data foundation based on cloud, because that is the best way to make sure data is accessible in real time, trustworthy and available around the clock to drive business results.

Data, data, everywhere

Every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created by humans, edge, IOT devices and machines. This is why companies are working to derive business value through data-driven decisioning: It's the way to innovate, differentiate and grow.

 Let's show, not just tell

The best way to show how cloud infrastructure can enhance the power of data is to look at some recent examples.

Here at Accenture, one of our continuing goals is to make data more visible and secure. To this end, our global IT Applied Intelligence team decided to move to Google Cloud’s PaaS model. As a result, we can deploy services faster, with improved application performance and stability, thanks to Google's data platform technology.

In the case of a leading European Telco we worked with, the need was to manage increased volumes of data post-merger. To help, we utilized the Google Cloud Platform to handle data ingestion and streaming as well as the consolidation of information from all internal and external channels. With advanced analytics and applied intelligence, the company now creates targeted customer campaigns to upsell and cross-sell to existing and new customers.  

For a global insurance business, the need was to stem the growing attrition rates of higher-value customers. The issue: It was unable to connect back-end and transactional data with digital data, due to gaps in digital analytics tracking. This prevented extraction of valuable insights from behavioral and campaign data of existing customers. Accenture helped with consolidation of multiple data sources into one platform: Google Cloud (BigQuery). This enabled targeted marketing initiatives. As a result, query execution improved from 8 hours to just 3 minutes.

Keys to unleashing the power of data and cloud

Consider anchoring your data infrastructure journey to a cloud provider that offers security as a baseline, not an add-on. Your provider should also utilize artificial intelligence, data accelerators and solutions such as BigQuery, to ensure proper handling of data across multiple clouds. In these cases, Google’s Anthos and BigQuery Omni have proven records of not only performance, but innovation. (Google's record of innovation includes inventing multiple cloud-standard technologies such as Kubernetes, Hadoop and others).

When it comes to hybrid, we worked with Google and Confluent to develop a solution called ANCON, which enables the modernization and migration of on-premise applications and legacy data storage systems to Google Cloud Platform, while keeping existing services fully operational— no downtime.

Whatever your decision, we at Accenture like to start from an agnostic, what-problem-are-you-trying-to-solve approach. Beyond that, consider a partner that can prove it knows data and cloud and your industry. it should also be able to tap into highly skilled global experts and a set of accelerators.    

Three ways to supercharge your infrastructure

The overall goal: ensure data can be processed, analyzed and managed across clouds and regions without borders. This type of cross-cloud data management can be accomplished through three actions as part of an overall transformation to cloud:

1) Develop a robust unified data strategy. Evaluate your data strategy holistically, and keep sight of business objectives by integrating the data strategy into business, culture and processes. A good strategy also usually includes collaboration with strategic partners that have the required experience and expertise in data management, as well as relevant industry expertise. This in turn provides a path for enterprises to assess their data maturity and map their data journey to become a data-driven organization.  As one example, Accenture’s Data Maturity Model helps businesses shift away from the idea of ‘single-use data’ where it's coupled to particular schemas and formats.

2) Invest in AI-backed cloud data management platforms, which helps enterprises integrate data from multiple sources irrespective of the underlying architecture and regardless of which cloud platforms are used. Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP) BigQuery is a good example of this because it is a serverless, highly scalable and multi-cloud data warehouse designed for business agility. The advantage of serverless data warehousing is that Google does all resource provisioning behind the scenes, so that enterprises can focus on data and analysis rather than worrying about upgrading, securing, or managing the infrastructure. It also includes BigQuery Omni which is a flexible, multi-cloud analytics solution and allows enterprises to securely analyze data stored in multiple public clouds without any cross-cloud movement or copies of data.

It is equally important that the data management platform has AI/ML tools to address challenges associated with automated cleansing and processing of data, analysis of unstructured data, and generating real-time actionable insights.

3) Foster a data-driven culture. The commitment to become data-driven company should permeate the enterprise, from the CEO down. The key: helping everybody understand that data is the new capital. Of course, change management is central to this. Fortunately there are tools and platforms that can help drive data literacy and adoption. For example, Data QnA, a natural language interface for analytics on BigQuery data, makes it easier for non-technical users to access the data insights they need through natural language understanding techniques—all while maintaining the business’s governance and security controls. But ultimately, it’s about building new habits, embedding them into the way people work and how products or services are marketed and sold, and establishing measurement metrics.

Remember, how well you set up and synchronize your data infrastructure will have a direct effect on how well your data drives insights and, ultimately, growth. To get started, visit www.accenture.com/google.