Best practices

Data will not stop. Better plan for scale. 

How an open data delivery platform can help you futureproof for the inevitable. 

With every second that goes by your business collects more data, and it does this around the clock. Every interaction with business applications, whether automated or manually driven by people creates new data which is collected and stored for business intelligence and insights analysis. And when it comes to growth in data volumes, the gravity is only up.  The data is often stored in siloed ERPs, unstructured databases, business applications and even spreadsheets, and accessible to a select set of users. This means other functions, processes and workflows that could benefit from visibility to this data are in the dark about its existence and value.  

When working with billions of rows of data from disparate sources, scalability becomes crucial for several key reasons: 
 

  • Operational efficiency – Processing large-scale datasets with billions of rows of data requires a lot of compute power to get usable query response times and avoid bottlenecks, data latency and performance issues. 
     
  • Analytics and insights – While storing and processing all this data is its own challenge, the goal ultimately is to extract valuable insights for decision-making and perform complex analytics. As your data grows and new datasets are added, complex analysis, joins, calculations, and aggregations become more difficult.  
     
  • Flexibility for the future – As organizations and business models evolve and dataset sizes grow, data leaders will need to easily support this expansion without the need to make significant architectural changes. The flexibility to scale horizontally, vertically, and elastically, processing higher volumes of data and still maintaining high-performance standards will pave the way for future growth.  
  • Data quality and trust – Confidence in decision-making comes from trusting the insights you get from your data. This is where data quality becomes vital. Having visibility to transaction-level details helps analysts validate metrics, expose anomalies, study root-cause and answer new questions with a high degree of confidence in their analysis.  

Incorta’s open data delivery platform is powered by smart lakehouse technology that easily integrates with your modern data stacks, bringing business-ready data to users and downstream applications, to build innovative, new capabilities and accelerate migration of data to the cloud at scale.  

With a large portfolio of out-of-the-box data connectors, you can connect to virtually any data source, even complex ERP systems, and access 100% of your data instantly.  

Simplifying how organizations connect, access, model, enrich and analyze their data, even from multiple, disparate sources with billions of records, allows users to gain visibility to data down to the transaction level, freeing them to drill in any direction for analysis. Incorta’s revolutionary Direct Data Mapping™ technology eliminates the need to reshape and pre-aggregate your data. With a map of all the data and their relationship, you can enjoy sub-second queries on large datasets without compromising performance or disrupting business workflows.  

By quickly ingesting data from many popular business data sources and insanely fast incremental refreshes, often as little as a few minutes, you can be sure the business has access to the latest data available. And since Incorta works with your existing security parameters, you can maintain control over data access, governance and lineage. At the use case level, Incorta offers data applications, pre-built schemas and business views that are designed for complex data sources such as Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP, NetSuite and even business applications such as Workday Adaptive and BlackLine. Data apps are fully customizable to fit your business data needs and give you a jumpstart on deploying new analytics across functions including finance, human resources and supply chain.  

In summary, scale is fundamental when working with billions of rows of data, complex data sources and multisource environments. An open data delivery platform offers the flexibility to access and augment your data with ease, deliver data across the entire enterprise with speed and simplify cloud data migration at scale. the two main ingredients of compute and data at scale will take centerstage.  


This blog is part of a four-part series demonstrating Incorta’s FAST capabilities. If you missed the first two on “Freshness” and “Accelerate,” read here. If you’d like to continue with this series, stay tuned for part 4 “Trust”.