Data Modernization

Tear down data silos and leverage all organizational data in the cloud

Building data environments for the modern era

Organizations know modernizing their data is a critical part of their business today. In fact, IDG reports that 91% of senior IT and business decision-makers say the ability to integrate data from any source is critical to their organization’s strategic goals. This is no small part due to the costs of poor decision making leveraging incomplete data, which costs US business an estimated $3 trillion per year. In addition to making better business decisions, organizations also recognize that modern data estates, which includes all the databases, infrastructure, analytics, and other data services in your IT environment, enable them to capture cloud benefits like its cost-effective, scalable, and flexible resources. They also help enable future use cases to leverage AI and unlock new insights and improve IT security postures.

Modern challenges

The problem, however, has been that modernizing data estates and environments is a serious undertaking requiring a lot of heavy lifting, resulting in only 52% of data integration projects being successfully completed over the past two years. Common reasons include budgetary constraints, insufficient tools or technology, a lack of the necessary in-house skill sets or knowledge (to include ensuring data security and compliance requirements are met), and difficulty scaling IT resources to manage project volume.

Regardless of the challenges, an organization might face, or where they are in their data modernization journey, Neal Analytics has the tools, skills, and knowledge to support any organization’s projects. Neal Analytics offers flexible deployment models, enabling us to drop in and help modernize an entire environment, build a proof of concept or quick wins to validate requests for additional budget, or even support in-house staff with our team of experts.

Working with Neal Analytics will not only help overcome the data modernization challenges an organization is facing but enable them to unlock new insights, enhance IT security, and more effectively capture the benefits of the cloud.

91% of senior decision makers say the ability to integrate data is critical

Benefits

Capture and process data at competitive speeds

Access real-time analytics and ML

Improved security and compliance

2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day

Capture cloud benefits

According to a 2018 article from Forbes, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day. With so much data being generated quickly, capturing all of it with legacy data infrastructure is challenging, let alone processing it on time. When digital trends and behaviors change at a moment’s notice, being able to ingest quickly, process, and leverage all relevant data is vital to staying competitive.

Data modernization on Microsoft Azure or any other major cloud platform can help alleviate these challenges. Azure offers scalable, cost-effective, and flexible cloud resources and solutions that can be leveraged in modern data warehouses and data lakes to ingest and process data at scale, no matter the volume, velocity, or variety of the data.

Neal Analytics knows how to modernize data estates so that it becomes easy to scale resources up and down to meet data storage and usage demands, helping reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by constantly right-sizing the IT environment. Modern data estates built by Neal also leverage robust APIs, making integrations with disparate data sources and apps much more straightforward than on-premises.

Modernizing data estates also enables organizations to:

  • Swap CapEx for OpEx, enabling a complete tax write-off of cloud infrastructure expenses
  • Leverage cloud service-level agreements (SLAs) to support required database uptimes
  • Take advantage of cloud-enabled solutions, such as real-time data analytics and AI-driven customer insights, and marketing personalization.
modern data warehouse with real time analytics flow

Unlock insights

A key driver for data modernization is integrating all organizational data to discover new business opportunities and unlock new customer insights. Since modern data solutions like Azure Data Warehouses and Azure Data Lakes leverage robust APIs, cost-effective and scalable cloud resources, organizations gain the ability to quickly and cost-efficiently query databases containing all organizational data. This helps organizations get a complete picture and helps to avoid costly mistakes made on incomplete data.

Modern data warehouses gain access to new, cloud-enabled solutions like Azure Synapse Analytics. Azure Synapse Analytics brings together data warehousing and Big Data analytics to enable organizations to query data at scale, leveraging serverless or provisioned resources.

Similarly, modern data lakes can leverage services like Data Lake Analytics, enabling organizations to leverage U-SQL, R, Python, and .Net to develop and run data transformation and processing programs over petabytes of data. They can also leverage services like HDInsight, a fully managed Cloud Hadoop solution that provides optimized open-source analytic clusters for Spark, Hive, Map Reduce, HBase, Storm, Kafka, and R-Server.

By modernizing data estates on a major cloud platform like Azure, organizations also gain access to real-time analytics solutions, like Azure Stream Analytics, which leverage machine learning to detect anomalies in data. Anomalies can indicate anything from a valuable business opportunity with a limited window to a bad actor or cyberattack attempting to steal data, making real-time analytics a powerful and valuable tool.

app modernization security benefits gdpr hipaa ccpa dss fedramp

Enhanced security and compliance

With several high profile data breaches over the past 20 years (most of which took place in the last decade) and a constantly evolving landscape surrounding data privacy legislation, it is essential to ensure IT security is rigid enough to protect against cyberthreats but flexible enough to adapt to new laws and regulations.

Neal Analytics experts know about compliance laws and regulations and are cognizant of new or pending legislation that can impact organizations. Additionally, Neal always leverages security best practices in all their projects, including data modernization projects. As a result, Neal can help organizations cloud-enabled IT security solutions that protect their data estates against bad actors, malware attacks, vulnerabilities, and more while maintaining compliance with virtually any regulation, including HIPAA, GDPR, FERPA, PCI DSS, FedRAMP, CCPA, and any other relevant regulation.

Neal Analytics can also help organizations:

  • Enhance data security with encryption in transit and at rest
  • Take advantage of edge computing to support data sovereignty requirements and reduce bandwidth requirements.
  • Implement real-time network monitoring solutions that proactively detect and mitigate application attacks and other threats
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Getting started

Neal Analytics can accelerate your data modernization journey, leading to rapid time to value. Having leveraged industry best practices to drive multiple end-to-end cloud migration and modernization projects for all major cloud providers, Neal Analytics can support even the most complex migrations via:

  • Flexible engagement models resulting in the ability to jump in and help no matter where an organization is in its journey to the Cloud
  • Broad and deep experience with multiple cloud platforms and best-of-breed technologies
  • Industry best practices expertise

Migration offers

Ready to begin? We have a series of quick-start programs available to help you get started today. Follow the links below to learn more.

Looking to migrate a service or solution not listed above? We manage migration and modernization projects for virtually all types of databases, regardless if on-premises, VMs, or in a private or public cloud. Contact us to learn more.

Resources