I hear the term modern data platform (I will refer to it as MDP, because I am lazy) or modern data architecture is thrown around a lot these days. For those of you who wonder what the heck is modern about data architectures and why you should care, I have summarised some of the key benefits of a good data platform in 2021 for an enterprise. For those of you who already have a complex system that solves the business’s need to harness value from its data assets, I invite you to read the list below to make sure your platform is providing you with all the benefits of a ‘modern data platform’. If not then it may be time to dig into the concept a bit deeper

The enterprise that aims to derive insights and make decisions using their data can tell you it hasn’t been easy. A data platform of today’s era aims to solve that. Here are some key benefits you can hope to achieve with massive investment into a data platform of 2021:

• Involve more and more people in the data value chain: This is done by enabling self-service for a wide range of users who produce and consume data. MDP also brings data discoverability and governance capabilities to aid in democratizing data.
• Data management is a cost-effective endeavour: Both storing and processing huge amounts of data should be efficient both in terms of the cost and the resources required to achieve success. MDP reduces the cost of maintenance of complex workloads to massage the data for use and build high-quality data products.
• Make it easier to produce business value in an agile fashion: Business needs, data sources, and shape changes more often than not. An extreme example being the COVID pandemic forcing businesses to reconsider their strategies. MDP doesn’t get in the way of enterprises trying to swiftly react to changing market conditions and dynamics but rather speeds the process with accurate and timely data to support it. It allows for various kinds of use cases be it descriptive or predictive analytics. In the ideal case, someone should be able to come up with a hypothesis and prove or disprove it within days and not weeks if the tooling works for them as intended