The benefits of the modern data stack for your business

In our recent articles, we’ve addressed various ways IT leadership can help their companies to become data-driven organizations. We’ve looked at topics such as migrating data to a cloud-based warehouse or data lake, how data can be leveraged to generate insights, and how those insights can be used to automate business processes through machine learning and AI.

We will now take a step back and look at how the different stages of data management need to be integrated to enable genuine business efficiency and innovation. We’re talking about a new approach to data integration known as the modern data stack (MDS).      

What is the modern data stack, and how do we create one?

The modern data stack is not some revolutionary new technology that only cloud-native businesses and early adopters are implementing. It’s in fact a set of applications hosted in the cloud that are combined to enable the most efficient data integration. 

An MDS is generally made up of the following tools: 

• An ELT pipeline: ELT refers to “Extract, load, transform”. This is the stage in our MDS where data is moved from different sources such as web apps like Salesforce or databases like MySQL into a form of storage. For example, our partner, Fivetran, provides solutions to manage the multiple steps in the ELT and automate data integration.    
• A data destination: This is the data warehouse or data lake where the data transported by the ELT ends up. The data at this stage can be accessed and analyzed. A commonly used tool is Google BigQuery, a cloud data warehouse that allows for fast and easy analysis of your stored data.  
• A data transformation tool: This is a tool to transform the data sitting in your destination into user-friendly models that can be easily queried and used for insights. You can consider Astronomer powered by Apache Airflow for this component of your MDS. 
• A data visualization platform: Here, the data is visualized in dashboards so that non-IT employees can understand it and apply it to their work. A BI platform such as Looker, Looker Studio from Google Cloud will help to provide teams across your business with a common definition of their metrics. 

The problems with the traditional data stack 

Those businesses that have yet to upgrade to a modern data stack may not be aware of the lags and inefficiencies their traditional data stack (TDS) is creating. Here are a few of the most common problems we as a cloud partner encounter when working with our clients:   

• Inefficiency and lost time: If your data can’t be organized in a swift manner and quickly generate business insights, you are wasting precious time and manpower. 

• It’s more expensive: Business intelligence reports that could be generated automatically via a visualization platform need to be created by hand; more documents means more load on your IT infrastructure and wasted employee time, increasing both cloud spend and general overhead.   
• It’s not scalable enough: Legacy approaches to IT infrastructure like relying on on-prem storage puts a crimp on advanced data analysis and other applications needed to grow your business.  

The benefits of the modern data stack 

There are many benefits to implementing an MDS, but here we’ll focus on the most important ones: 

• More time for insights: Using off-the-shelf cloud tools to build your data stack rather than relying on internal DevOps resources frees your engineers to focus on the innovation that will power your business growth.   

• Big savings on IT spend: Moving from an on-prem infrastructure to a cloud-based one greatly reduces operating costs such as the maintenance of physical servers and purchasing new hardware.   

• More flexibility: With an MDS running on a cloud-based infrastructure rather than on-prem hardware, employees can access work-related applications and data from almost anywhere, enabling a more agile work environment. 

• Better security and data governance: Adopting off-the-shelf MDS tools from vendors with built-in data security and governance protocols creates a secure stack from end-to-end, taking the pressure off DevOps teams to constantly monitor new updates and regulations.

Build your modern data stack with CloudMile and Fivetran 

Updating your company’s IT infrastructure from a traditional data stack to a modern one is no small undertaking, but there is no need to do it alone. As a cloud partner, CloudMile will be there to support you in building out every layer of your MDS. What’s more, our CloudMile Data Lab Solution gives you access to integration with top-level technologies through our close partnership with Fivetran throughout Southeast Asia.

Read more: Accelerate data transformation with CloudMile and Fivetran