CDO Guide for Creating a Cloud Data Strategy: Assessing Your Cloud Data Management Strategy
Modern executives view data as a critical asset that must be managed, nurtured, enriched, and delivered in a timely manner to all employees, customers, suppliers, partners, applications, and systems that need it. They work hard to eliminate data silos, data defects, and data redundancies that block the free flow of information. They govern and standardize data to facilitate new mission-critical applications. They secure data to prevent unwanted exposure of corporate or customer information. And they use data to build innovative digital and data-driven products that disrupt the market.
The problem with data is that it’s notoriously slippery. It’s distributed, volatile, and hard to corral. It’s a soft asset with big costs that is difficult to exploit without skilled data professionals, data literate employees, and a flexible data infrastructure that adapts quickly to changing business needs.
As the gravity of data shifts to the cloud, organizations need to upgrade their ability to ingest, integrate, clean, govern, engineer, master, catalog, secure, and prepare data. To keep up with growing demand for data assets, data teams need to switch from purpose-built tools and hand-coding to cloud-based data management platforms powered by AI that automate tasks and pre-integrate all the functionality organizations need to connect business people with relevant data.