Operational inefficiency
Self-managed environments must be provisioned to
accommodate application and data growth, intermittent
spikes, and performance requirements. The costs of these
tasks can be fixed capital costs, which include software
licensing and support, hardware capacity and refresh,
and resources to install and manage the hardware and
software.
Compatibility and future-proofing
Fast innovation comes from vibrant communities of
developers and users around powerful open source
technologies. Businesses rely on open source technologies
such as Apache Hadoop, Hive, Spark, Kafka, and
Elasticsearch for their most business-critical tasks and their
highly sensitive data. Keeping up with new releases, bugs,
and security patches, all on different schedules, is critical
to success—but doing so in a self-managed environment
and without significant impact on users or customers is
quite difficult.
Security and compliance
The rapidly changing privacy and security landscape
makes it difficult for businesses to keep their self-
managed data platforms compliant. The costs of a
regulatory violation can be severe, and the costs of a
security incident—including possible loss of revenue due
to a decline in customer trust—are usually even worse.
Businesses must work tirelessly to ensure uninterrupted
protection and compliance, conducting rigorous audits
and keeping up with standards such as PCI, HIPAA, SOC,
and more in the US and around the globe.
Cost issues
Maintaining a dedicated team of experts to manage
open source analytics environments carries a high total
cost of ownership. As data and applications scale, many
businesses find that they need to pay for more advanced
features that are not available in the free versions of
open source software, creating further cost burdens.
5
CHALLENGES
