Calculating the ROI of a Smart Data Lake

Posted by Kirk Newell on Jun 17, 2016 11:49:10 AM
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While businesses are projected to spend more than $40 billion annually on Big Data-related initiatives by 2018, according to IDC, many companies are still unsure exactly how to calculate their ROI.

calculating ROI“Smart” data lakes prove the value of analytics and discovery at Big Data scale because “smart” not only refers to the quantity and quality of business insights gained, smart also means extracting more value for less money. While the conventional data lake can be deployed quickly, the savings in data preparation and modeling is paid for later. Analysts and data scientists find they still have significant work to do when they approach it to ask questions and analyze data.

However, enterprises are able to use tools and methodologies to quickly load data into their Smart Data Lake™ solution and reap near-immediate value. Here are just a few ways companies are securing Big Data ROI with Smart Data Lakes:

  • For a one-time cost to load data into a graph representation, data scientists and others in the enterprise can reuse and combine data on-demand for any set of questions or analysis without the need for assistance from the IT department or the hiring of additional programmers.
  • An organization’s access controls can be integrated with appropriate roles for stewardship and review, ensuring analysts, data scientists and others can have confidence in the value of their insights.
  • Data is based on a shared model of concepts and ontologies that everyone is already using to run the business. This can transform nearly every aspect of an enterprise’s data discovery activities and provide significant time-to-market and process efficiencies.
  • IDC predicts that by 2020, organizations that are able to analyze all relevant data and deliver actionable information will achieve an extra $430 billion in productivity benefits over their less analytically oriented peers.
  • Even more amazing? The ROI accelerates as employees within the enterprise become more comfortable and experienced at extracting value from data with each new project.

Of course, the exact path to ROI varies for each industry and application.

For example, financial institutions are using smart data lakes to monitor regulatory compliance inside the organization. For those using standard compliance platforms, with hundreds of people looking at false positives day in and day out and then having to clear them, from anti-money laundering to fraud to illegal-trading, through email surveillance and the like, the business case is seen as extremely simple to justify. Smart data lakes significantly reduces the number of analysts necessary to do all this work.

In the pharmaceutical arena, organizations can spend more than $2 billion and more than a decade working to get a drug to market. Clinicians and data scientists in the industry have found significant value in smart data lakes, allowing them to navigate wide and complex clinical data models to answer ad-hoc questions without manual data preparation or IT intervention. They can more seamlessly and expeditiously secure answers from of a wider array of data than ever before, reducing time-to-market for a new drug.

The Anzo Smart Data Lake solution simplifies data analysis and discovery at enterprise scale with unprecedented flexibility, insight and speed for any business user, delivering unprecedented value and ROI for the organization. To learn more, download the Smart Data Lake whitepaper.

Download the Whitepaper

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