Why Are Midsize Organisations Opting for a Modern Data Platform?

When midsize organisations start experiencing challenges with their data, they usually do one of two things:

a) Ignore the problem and hope it'll go away (it won't; it just gets worse).

b) Try to solve the problem using inadequate tools they've outgrown and are unscalable.

Implementing a modern data platform, i.e. your data infrastructure backbone, to solve these issues is often dismissed due to fear of costs and complexity. However, this is no longer the case. You can quickly scale a modern data platform, and the ROI is unquestionable.

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Data is everywhere, out of control and frustrating to work with

As you know and are probably experiencing, the data struggle is real for most midsized organisations today. As you strive to grow in a data-driven world, you face a huge obstacle: your data is scattered everywhere.

It's across multiple platforms, departments, and systems (and, commonly, on people's desktops). Not only is this a considerable risk to data security and the sanity of your Head of Data, but it also affects the ability to use this data for insights and to drive well-informed business decisions. As we enter a new age of AI, businesses are looking to reassess their foundations, including getting their data foundations sorted once and for all.

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What are the common scenarios we see?

The most frequent scenario is that businesses are making do with outdated tools and technologies.

Mostly, this involves using Power BI as both a data visualisation tool and a (limited capability) data platform. Over time, you’ll start to experience duplicate reports, performance issues, and performance degradation from source systems. You’ve reached the limit of what Power BI can do, and it’s time to improve performance and analyse more of the data you want and in a much quicker timeframe. The answer is a modern data platform.

Another common scenario is the business attempting to find all its key data sources and appropriately store them. For a mid-sized organisation, this is usually a legacy data warehouse or data platform that no longer meets your requirements. Although this is a promising step for the business, it's often not enough. By that, we mean that all the data and processes around it haven't been considered – governance, visualisation tools like Power BI, and integration. Again, a modern data platform will solve these issues.

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The myth of the modern data platform

Somewhere along the lines, many organisations started perceiving a modern data platform as only suitable for large enterprises with huge volumes of data and huge budgets. This is untrue.

A modern data platform (definition = a technology infrastructure that enables you to collect, store, process, analyse, and visualise data from various sources in real-time or near-real-time) is highly suitable for both smaller and midsized organisations when tailored correctly.

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Our recommendation

If your organisation wants to continue gaining value from self-service tools like Power BI, investing in a modern data platform will quickly and easily unlock new efficiency and agility.

Another problem solved is data security. As regulatory requirements become more stringent, data privacy and compliance must be prioritised to avoid fines and reputational damage. With robust data governance frameworks, which form part of building a modern data platform, you can achieve this.

And, when the time comes to roll out advanced analytics and AI projects, you'll also know that you already have the proper data platform in place to outpace your competitors.

With the right platform, strategies, and mindset, it's possible to transform your organisation from data chaos into data clarity and emerge stronger and more resilient in an increasingly competitive market environment.