MODERNIZING YOUR DATA INFRASTRUCTURE
2
Introduction
Data has become much more than a business
commodity—it is the beating heart of today's succesful
organizations. Data drives decisions and solves
problems to help organizations become more agile,
efficient, and innovative.
The high volumes of data being created by digital busi-
nesses have increased the urgency for CIOs to deploy a
data infrastructure that goes beyond the on-premises
databases and data warehouses of the past. A modern
data strategy lets you store any amount of data you
need at low cost and in open, standards-based data
formats. It makes data more accessible while keeping it
secure, empowering people to run analytics or machine
learning (ML) using their preferred tool or technique to
make the data actionable for specific tasks or use cases.
For organizations running legacy data infrastructure
on-premises or self-managed in the cloud, overseeing
this infrastructure is tedious, time-consuming, and ex-
pensive. IT teams spend time worrying about hardware
and software installation, configuration, performance
and availability, capacity planning and cluster scaling,
and security and compliance issues.
Further, data modernization is critical to creating a
foundation for new business and revenue opportuni-
ties, streamlining crucial decision-making, and improv-
ing efficiencies. CIOs and other IT leaders have come
to view data and business analytics as a top driver of
IT investments to deliver business objectives. In IDG's
State of the CIO study, data and business analytics
technology initiatives topped the list of planned IT
investments for 2021.
By modernizing their data infrastructure, organizations
move away from on-premises data stores and onto the
cloud. With the cloud, organizations access IT resources
like storage, database, analytics, and ML over the inter-
net instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical
data centers and servers. The cloud platform takes care
of routine management tasks such as server provision-
ing, patching, configuration, and backups.
This e-book explores why data modernization is a de-
fining moment for any organization looking to reinvent
itself, and the infrastructure components CIOs can put in
place to ensure a smooth modernization journey.
3
Business imperatives for
modernizing data infrastructure
4
IT imperatives for modernizing
data infrastructure
Benefits of data modernization
in the cloud
5
Key components of a modern
data infrastructure
• Purpose-built databases
• Data warehouse
Security and compliance
• Storage
• Analytics systems
8
Take the next step in your
data modernization journey
8 Sponsor viewpoint
Contents