The Smart Data Blog

5 Data Lake Capabilites Essential to Business Success

Written by Marty Loughlin | Aug 31, 2015 1:13:33 PM

Many data lake projects achieve their IT objective: cheap storage of all enterprise data in raw form, but fail in their business objective to deliver value from this data. Why? Because making the data accessible and usable for business users is hard.

To deliver the business value promised by the data lake, we need to rethink our approach and construct solutions with business users and solutions in mind. 

Here are 5 key capabilities that are essential to making your data lake project a successful business endeavor:

  1. A common way to transform and harmonize your enterprise data, regardless of its source, structured or unstructured, inside or outside the enterprise
  2. A unified way to describe all the data in your lake - what it means and how it links together - in terms that are meaningful to business users
  3. Business user self-service capabilities for browsing, searching and combining the data sets required for their use case
  4. Ad hoc data discovery and analytics tools that allow business users to ask any question of the data, including ones not anticipated in advance
  5. Support for enterprise data quality, governance and access control policies

To learn more about an approach to providing these capabilities, check out the new white paper from Cambridge Semantics:

Anzo Smart Data Lake: Enterprise Graph-Based Data Discovery, Analytics and Governance