While COVID-19 catalysed ASEAN’s digitisation, the upward trajectory of the region’s digital economy was already apparent before the pandemic – on track to cross a whopping US$300 billion by 2025.
What’s the lifeblood of this digital economy? Data. With more than 40 million people coming online for the first time in 2020 alone, it is no surprise that ASEAN is one of the most data-rich regions in the world. Data as a resource is abundant and will only continue to grow in this region.
Many organisations have leveraged this data to become more resilient amidst the uncertain economic climate. They are stepping up investments in core data competencies across business intelligence, data engineering, data science, and machine learning.
Yet, few organisations have laid the proper groundwork for a truly data-driven business model in getting ahead with these technologies.
According to recent research from MIT Technology Review, just 13 per cent of organisations worldwide ‘excel’ at delivering upon their data strategies. Another study finds that anywhere from 60 per cent to 73 per cent of all data goes unused.
Without adequate data strategies, businesses miss massive opportunities to understand their customers better, offer high-value products, streamline operations, and more.
If it is so critical to succeeding in the long-term, why are so many organisations effectively using it— or worse, struggling even to get started entirely?
It’s not too late for organisations to catch up.
To provide the optimal performance and capabilities that will drive your organisation forward, organisations can look to these three technology pillars to create the foundation for a successful, transformative data strategy.
Modernise your data architecture
To set your organisation up for data-driven success, reevaluate your data architecture. In the past, different use cases demanded other data structures. For example, business intelligence typically requires data warehouses— a collection of data structured and filtered for particular purposes.
Other use cases, like data science or machine learning, required separate data lakes — or extensive collections of unstructured, raw data. Over time, organisations will adopt more solutions or add onto existing ones, creating a messy and expensive network of applications that don’t always work well together.
Networks like these are difficult to maintain and prevent separate data teams from collaborating with a single source of truth, limiting an organisation’s ability to get the most value from data.
A fast-growing trend in the industry is to rationalise existing, complex architecture to streamline the ability to gain new insights. With over half of respondents in Asia-Pacific and Japan either searching for or implementing a new data platform to address current data challenges, more so than any region. What type of platform should they adopt?
Rather than incorporate several disconnected solutions for different use cases, look for an open and modern data architecture that can grow with your organisation. Architectures that allow all data teams, from marketing to data engineers, to work with it and collaborate on a central platform — no matter the use case — will accelerate innovation faster for the entire organisation.
Build your tech stack in the cloud(s)
While it was initially considered a nice-to-have, cloud is now the foundation for modernising and successfully scaling data management. The shift towards the cloud has steadily gained momentum since its introduction in the early 2000s, exploding in recent years as the de facto approach to building modern platforms.
It provides more excellent storage, computing ability and interoperability, making it an obvious choice for most enterprises.
2020 may have best highlighted the many benefits of the cloud. When companies closed offices because of the pandemic, cloud-based technologies like Zoom and Slack helped teams seamlessly work together when they couldn’t access on-prem solutions.
The shift is likely to stick; most significant enterprises in Singapore have begun to use some form of cloud storage, and investment in the public cloud is expected to grow rapidly over the next five years, from US$1.5 billion in 2018 to about US$3.6 billion in 2023.
Even further, many data and technology leaders go as far as to say that it’s not enough to think about cloud in the singular sense but rather about building for a multi-cloud environment. As the adoption of cloud-based technology grows, many data teams are now looking for solutions that can move across major clouds like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud if needed.
Typically they understand a multi-cloud capability can provide their organisations with several benefits: the flexibility to run workloads anywhere, easy integrations when bringing on new solutions or businesses that use other cloud providers, and the assurance that they can comply with regulations down the road.
Embrace open source and open standards
As data architectures evolve, the value of open-source and open standards will only increase. Open source is already top-rated; RedHat found that over two-thirds of IT leaders in the Asia Pacific use open source for infrastructure modernisation.
The region is also ahead of others in tapping open-source for AI and machine learning workloads, with 51 per cent using open-source software in those projects today compared to 48 per cent in the US and 45 per cent in EMEA.
Open source has several advantages. It prevents teams from building tricky solutions in-house from scratch, which eats up resources; it usually comes at little to no cost, and it’s tried and true— solutions have been thoroughly adopted and vetted by many, meaning fewer headaches for your IT team down the road.
It also offers complete transparency and visibility into source code and discussions surrounding it. Your team will know how bugs are addressed, while proprietary software may not disclose bugs or common problems experienced by others. Even more, open-source brings with it an entire community of those encountering the same challenges and working toward the exact solutions as you.
These technologies further complement cloud-based platforms, helping enterprises quickly roll out the latest innovations even with a strapped budget. Embracing open data formats also helps fend off vendor lock-in, delivering the flexibility that will allow organisations to more easily share data securely across systems and tools, from wherever their it lives.
As data becomes increasingly integral to your organisation’s success and growth, the technology you put into place can either enable that growth or hinder it.
Together, these three pillars of technology— modern data architectures, multi-cloud, and open source— will establish an IT ecosystem that not only supports your data strategy and solves for business needs, but future-proofs your organization to take on whatever challenges may come.
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