Data is the differentiator as business leaders look to utilize their competitive edge as they implement generative AI (gen AI). Leaders feel the pressure to infuse their processes with artificial intelligence (AI) and are looking for ways to harness the insights in their data platforms to fuel this movement. Indeed, IDC has predicted that by the end of 2024, 65% of CIOs will face pressure to adopt digital tech, such as generative AI and deep analytics.
The ability to effectively deploy AI into production rests upon the strength of an organization’s data strategy because AI is only as strong as the data that underpins it. Organizations require reliable data for robust AI models and accurate insights, yet the current technology landscape presents unparalleled data quality challenges, specifically as the growth of data spans multiple formats: structured, semistructured and unstructured. The data universe is expected to grow exponentially with data rapidly propagating on-premises and across clouds, applications and locations with compromised quality. This situation will exacerbate data silos, increase pressure to manage cloud costs efficiently and complicate governance of AI and data workloads. As a result of these factors, among others, enterprise data lacks AI readiness.
The importance of data integration:
The pressure to improve data usability so that organizations can scale AI is a daunting task for data teams and is compounded by the explosion of data volume in different formats and locations. Data must be combined and harmonized from multiple sources into a unified, coherent format before being used with AI models. This process is known as data integration, one of the key components to improving the usability of data for AI and other use cases, such as business intelligence (BI) and analytics. Data integration is now essential for companies to thrive, and by merging data from various sources, businesses can gain valuable insights, make better decisions, discover new revenue opportunities and streamline operations.
Implementing a data integration strategy:
The impact of a robust data strategy can bring immense, often unquantifiable, value to a business, but operationalizing it is no easy task. Organizations deal with diverse data sources, formats, tools, processing needs and unique business objectives, making the integration process highly complex. To effectively manage this strategy, a business’s data integration infrastructure must embody several key characteristics:
- Multiple integration styles: Organizations face a variety of use cases that require tailored approaches. Different integration styles, such as bulk/batch, real-time streaming or replication, can be purpose-fit to specific scenarios, helping ensure optimal performance and efficiency. This adaptability allows organizations to align their data integration efforts with distinct operational needs, enabling them to maximize the value of their data across diverse applications and workflows.
- Scalable data pipelines: Seasoned data teams are facing increasing pressure to respond to a growing number of data requests from downstream consumers, which is compounded by the drive for users to have higher data literacy and skills shortage of experienced data engineers. With that, a strategy that empowers less technical users and accelerates time to value for specialized data teams is critical.
- Hybrid: Enterprises harness several types of technology to address diverse business needs and enhance operational efficiency. Indeed, both data tooling stacks and data itself are more fragmented—residing across different geos, in multiple clouds and on-premises. A flexible approach that enables tooling coexistence as well as flexibility with locality of pipeline execution with targeted data planes or pushdown of transformation logic to data warehouses or lakehouses decreases unnecessary data movement to reduce or eliminate data egress charges.
- Observability: Data teams often struggle with visibility into the health and behavior of their data, which can greatly impact data quality, costs and decision making. With full observability into the data integration process, data users can proactively detect any quality issues and remediate them accordingly, enabling greater trust in data, improving downstream reliability.
- Support for all data types: Data is rapidly expanding across diverse types, locations and formats. With the majority of an organization’s data being unstructured and the need to tap into this enterprise data for downstream AI use cases, such as retrieval augmented generation (RAG) cases, clients are now interested in bringing DataOps practices to unstructured data. Organizations must support quality enhancement across structured, semistructured and unstructured data alike.
IBM’s approach:
IBM’s Data Fabric architecture offers composability and seamless integration to address the unique needs of enterprises. It provides a robust framework to ensure high-quality data for generative AI, while incorporating AI-driven services to improve data usability and scalability. Clients can choose from a set of integrated data integration products tailored to support AI, business intelligence, analytics and industry-specific requirements. This strategy helps organizations optimize data usage, expand into new markets, and increase revenue.
IBM’s data integration portfolio includes tools such as IBM DataStage for ETL/ELT processing, IBM StreamSets for real-time streaming data pipelines, and IBM Data Replication for low-latency, near real-time data synchronization. IBM Databand underpins this set of capabilities with data observability for pipeline monitoring and issue remediation. Built on a hybrid framework, IBM’s comprehensive solution allows enterprises to break down data silos and manage data pipelines across all sources, formats and integration patterns. This flexibility enables organizations to maximize the potential of their data, regardless of infrastructure or use case.
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