RESEARCH & RESOURCES

TDWI Checklist Report | Adopting Next-Generation Data Technologies

September 30, 2016

In this Checklist Report we look at some of the opportunities for embracing new technologies in ways that leverage the existing enterprise architectures and how to balance incorporating new techniques (where they add value) with reliance on enterprise-hardened architectures representing existing corporate investments.

The data management industry is currently abuzz with a growing variety of non-traditional approaches for enabling reporting, business intelligence (BI), and different kinds of analytics to meet the needs of business users hungering for actionable insight. In turn, the desire to adopt new and innovative technologies is increasingly being driven by business consumers aching to bypass the information technology (IT) department’s control of the application infrastructure as well as accelerate delivery of new services.

The emerging methods pose challenges to balancing technology choices. Although the traditional choice of relational database management systems (DBMS) from established vendors has generally been a sound one, big data techniques present new alternatives for rapidly delivering insight to the business user. On the one hand, established technologies can be perceived as inadequately addressing the rapid development and delivery needs users have for absorbing and analyzing massive amounts of structured and unstructured data generated via Web, mobile, cloud, SaaS, and other sources. On the other hand, new technologies are perceived as inadequate for supporting long-standing traditional transactional and analytical workloads.

Tools from new vendors incorporating new big data technologies (such as Hadoop) for distributed and parallel computing and NoSQL data management are rapidly being evaluated and brought into organizations. Hadoop is garnering significant curiosity and some measure of adoption, fueled by a combination of ease of use, opensource availability, and exploding venture capital investment. However, although these technologies offer scalable high performance and flexibility, today it may be premature to rely on them for enterpriseclass applications.

At the same time, numerous vendors of traditional platforms are offering the same or similar new technologies that are more robust and have more enterprise-ready capabilities than the new technologies can provide. This Checklist Report offers several important items to consider for your data management infrastructure, whether your implementation is on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid.


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