If “data is the new oil”, then insights are the new petrol – refined into something useful to get you going where you want to be. Aging fossil fuel based quotes aside, more and more organisations are discovering the difficulties associated with converting the increasing volumes of raw data being collected into rapid, reliable and manageable insights. The business end users are demanding more insights more rapidly – if we can add a new widget to our app in days, why does it take weeks or even months to get new data insights added to the dashboard?
For those maintaining the data pipelines, the pressure is on – and attempting to keep up using the old siloed, manual techniques is causing them stress as data is late, incomplete or poor quality. No one wants the embarrassment of an email on Monday morning when the customer has checked your data for you and found it incorrect. And as for keeping track of what data is sourced from where and used by whom, well, there’s not enough time in the day (or night) when you’re flying around fixing broken data pipelines.
For the IT industry issues with late delivery, poor quality, piling up technical debt and unhappy customers are nothing new – we saw them frequently when large monolithic software development projects stalked the land. The answer to many problems was to implement DevOps – using agile techniques to break projects down into more manageable pieces and facilitating a fast release cycle with virtualisation and automation. These faster release cycles presented specific challenges for database professionals, however, where integrity and security of the data is paramount and performance tuning can be an art as much as a science.
Triton Consulting has been at the forefront of helping organisations overcome these challenges and implement modern development techniques with databases of all shapes and sizes – from mainframes to cloud services – through our DevOps for Data service. This understanding of modern DevOps tools, techniques and processes, along with a long history of database and data engineering, meant a natural progression to offering a DataOps service.
So what’s the difference? Well, DevOps for Data focusses on integrating databases into the DevOps Software Development Life Cycle – enabling an organisation to deliver services, products, and channels to market faster. DataOps is all about analytics. Extracting value from data faster, with more accuracy, and refocussing effort on coming up with new insights instead of firefighting quality issues.
The Triton DataOps service combines DevOps techniques such as increased collaboration, automation and virtualisation, with the best of data engineering, governance, and data democratisation to enable organisations to generate value from data faster, more reliably and more efficiently. It’s not just a process in a single team – the whole organisation benefits. From the business user making a better informed decision, the data scientist who can finally prototype and deliver insights at the speed their customer demands, to the data engineer who can take pride in the flexibility and reliability of the data infrastructure and the data controller who can sleep safe in the knowledge that all data use is accounted for and in line with regulations.
DataOps is the fast, efficient, reliable, modern way to run your organisation’s data pipelines. Get in touch with Triton to see how you can electrify your analytics.