In our last two posts, we talked with Deloitte’s Marc Beierschoder and Martin Mannion respectively about the requirement organizations have to deploy their data and analytics, quickly, into a hybrid environment. On top of that, there is the fundamental aspect of consistent security and governance of your enterprise data cloud and need for multiple users with different requirements to access data flexibly. In part 3, we will discuss actual solutions to the challenges addressed and how to go about implementing these.
Closing off our conversation, we are joined by Raj Kamath, Managing Director at Deloitte, and Paul Mackay, the EMEA Cloud Lead at Cloudera and based on the challenges highlighted in the last two blogs in this series, we are looking at what solutions are available in the market to address these.
“When implemented correctly—with an agile architecture, strong governance, and customer-centric considerations—a data insights strategy can help you define and address your current organizational data needs, while making it easier to adapt to ever-changing regulations, customer sentiments, technologies, and business trends. ”
Deloitte
Developing a data insights strategy: How to extract value from your data
How are Deloitte and Cloudera together addressing this need for “enterprise-oriented, solution-based” data management in the cloud?
Raj:
I think almost every organization will eventually have some form of a hybrid model in their journey to cloud. Switching quickly to a cloud-only model is tough given the complexity of legacy ecosystems and may even be impossible in some business contexts. Use cases and unique capability needs may drive the usage of multiple cloud providers as well as on-premises options, and thus hybrid cloud is going to be the de facto standard for years to come. What we usually see is that having a transition period to integrate foundational work with the cloud providers, then a facilitation program, and then a larger transformational program, is the right process to be successful. With that three-step approach, organizations can adapt quite nicely to a hybrid model.
As a side note, an organization’s applications also need to be ready to support hybrid deployment models. That’s really important. With the latest workloads, including flexible infrastructure provisioning and hyper-converged infrastructure, you can build new integrated solutions to shift workloads between the clouds. And this is something that is really helpful for organizations to still leverage the data centers they have, whilst being able to pick the applications they want to move into the cloud to derive the highest benefit.
A strong solution here is an enterprise data cloud, which allows organizations to bridge and manage all of these workloads and data stores through a single view. You can also leverage the enterprise data cloud to start your hybrid cloud journey in deploying specific workloads into public cloud providers, which won’t require a lot of additional effort compared to building a completely new cloud infrastructure service. By using a platform that brings a level of abstraction and consolidates data sources, types and stores in this manner, your team also doesn’t need to re-train every time to deploy new infrastructure.
Another example of where the enterprise data cloud benefits the business is for platform users, who would only see one interface no matter where their data is sourced (public cloud, on-premises, private cloud). For example, a user that needs to train machine learning models needs access to GPUs, but those are expensive to deploy to a data center and also require upfront investment planning to order hardware, which I have seen take months. Shifting workloads like this to the hybrid cloud makes sense for the business (cost) and for the user (agility and flexibility) and that’s what an enterprise data cloud-like Cloudera Data Platform allows you to do.
Paul:
So we talked in a previous blog about the need to use an enterprise data cloud and here at Cloudera we actually defined what that is, based on a set of critical capabilities we identified from our experience in helping customers drive insight and value from their data.
“An enterprise data cloud unlocks the power of your data to serve customers better, operate with greater efficiency, and strengthen security to protect your business…. [It] delivers powerful self-service analytics across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, along with sophisticated and granular security and governance policies that IT and data leaders demand.”
Cloudera
This is further broken down into four key pillars:
- The enterprise data cloud is deployable to all clouds and data centers, in any combination
- The enterprise data cloud can support analytics for the complete data lifecycle
- The enterprise data cloud has consistent security and governance across all deployments
- The enterprise data cloud is 100% open (open for integration as well as based on open source)
Cloudera Data Platform is the world’s first implementation of such an enterprise data cloud, allowing organizations to deploy their analytics for the data lifecycle to any cloud and data center, with consistent security and governance, in a platform that’s 100% open. In all of these deployment options, Cloudera is providing the same functionality and furthermore, gives you a single control plane, allowing you to come in and access your data and analytics from a single pane of glass, regardless of where they are deployed. At the same time, this is delivering you a way of controlling user access and having visibility into all your environments. What’s more, a single definition of governance and data access policies ensures consistency between both deployments and workloads.
The thing that we then allow you to do is everything from collecting your data, enriching it, reporting, serving, and predicting outcomes based on it. We deliver various experiences that allow you to do these things in an automated, efficient manner, meaning you don’t have to spend your time plumbing these platforms together, making sure they integrate and secure correctly… It’s all accessible from this one place called Cloudera Data Platform.
The third aspect that we do is we provide you with a security and governance layer, defining the data context if you will, which means that you can provide all the things from user access control (who can access, when and where), right the way down to lineage, the metadata and also down to stopping certain data sets being generally available.
The final element is that we are completely open-source with the ecosystem, allowing us to drive innovation at a pace that is only available when you do that. We are also open in terms of integration and APIs, allowing you to connect your platforms or systems into it.
So we can supply an entire enterprise data cloud that works across locations, but that provides you with a single control plane and method for managing, accessing, using and gaining value from your datasets.
Raj:
As Deloitte, we are one of the largest platinum partners of Cloudera and have already delivered many projects in the past using the Cloudera technology. We are quite confident to closely collaborate with your team and Cloudera’s team: not to bring technology, but to bring impact to your enterprise.
As said in an earlier blog, the key to success is to embed the data, the new capabilities, the new flexibility, throughout your business and people. That’s our expertise as Deloitte: to have world-leading knowledge of your business domain and bring in an objective and informed outside perspective, working closely with your specialists and subject-matter experts from a functional and also technical side. We deliver faster value through skills, expertise, experience, and confidence. And together with Cloudera, this really changes the way that you do business.
Thanks for reading these blogs, written in partnership between Deloitte and Cloudera. If you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to our interview subject-matter experts below. Click through to Blog 1 and Blog 2 if you didn’t get a chance to read yet. Still craving more info? Click through to download this custom whitepaper, written by Deloitte, on running your enterprise data cloud.
Raj Kamath: LinkedIn
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