Quick Summary
Data infrastructure is the key pillar on which organizations build their data pipelines, data storage, and data retrieval. It helps businesses create, manage, and secure data. A robust data infrastructure and analytics strategy keeps data flows uninterrupted and protects data quality. From minimizing duplication of data and preventing data silos issues, data infrastructure strategy lays the foundation for data-driven decisions in organizations.
Today, there is a substantial advancement in database infrastructure with the emergence of hybrid clouds and edge locations. Big data infrastructure is the core of any digital augmentation. Therefore, organizations should rethink their data infrastructure strategy and modernize their data architecture before it’s too late. Organizations can take help from data infrastructure companies that provide enterprise data architecture services to create a flawless data strategy.
This article details steps for building robust data infrastructure and analytics pipelines that help businesses capitalize on their data assets.
What is Data Infrastructure?
Data infrastructure is the framework of technologies, systems, and processes that enable organizations to manage data effectively. It includes hardware and software components like servers, database infrastructure, and data management tools. This foundation supports data-driven initiatives, ensures data security, and enables informed decision-making across organizations.
Elements of Data Infrastructure Strategy
| Physical Infra Physical Infrastructure consists of data infra elements that establish the base of a data ecosystem. It includes the physical components and facilities for data storage, processing, and transmission.
| Information Infra Information Infrastructure consists of the conceptual and software elements that structure, control, and enable data accessibility. It also includes platforms that enhance resource usage.
| Analytics Infra Analytics Infrastructure incorporates the applications, platforms, and frameworks built to derive value and insights from data. BI tools for reporting, visualization, and sophisticated analytics.
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Why is it Critical to Build a Robust Data infrastructure?
The most advanced tech companies have sophisticated data teams that capitalize on their data stacks to power innovation and user experiences. What started as a monolithic infrastructure somewhere in 2005 has grown today into mostly cloud-accessible data analytics infrastructure. IDC has estimated that by 2025, over 55 billion connected IoT devices will generate almost 80B zettabytes (ZB) of data.
- As more data has moved into cloud-based apps, often disparate apps and different business systems, there is a need to build flexible data architectures for working and utilizing data.
- The exponential increase in data volumes (verging towards Zettabytes) also requires businesses to manage these data volumes efficiently.
- Today organizations need real-time and seamless connectivity with their data sources (consumer touch points, SaaS apps, business apps, and web apps).
- Data is helping businesses create a competitive moat (key differentiation). Based on data analysis they can offer and recommend personalized products/services.
- Even internal departments (marketing, finance, operations, HR) need data insights to make quicker and on-time decisions.
Without building a robust and tamper-proof data science infrastructure, companies can’t manage, store, or retrieve data as required for insights and business decision-making.
6 Steps to Build Robust & Scalable Data Infrastructure
1. Define Your Data Strategy and Start from the Beginning
Creating your data plan is the foundation of building a strong data setup. This key first step involves a full review of your company’s data scene, including current methods future aims, and possible hurdles. By linking your data plan with overall business goals, you make a guide that shapes all future choices and steps in your data setup journey.
Remember! All your data complexity can be solved with a robust and intelligent data infrastructure.
To kick things off, do a deep dive into your data. Look at what you gather, where it comes from, and how you use and protect it right now. This helps you spot gaps, overlaps, and ways to make your data setup better. Get people from different teams involved to make sure your plan covers all the bases and takes care of everyone’s needs. This sets you up for a well-rounded approach to handling your data. Hire from the most trusted data infrastructure companies to expedite the process
Key points:
- Perform a detailed data audit
- Align data strategy with business goal
- Understand the future vision and current state
- Develop a phased analytics plan
- Gather requirements from stakeholders
- Document all source systems and data sources
2. Build a Comprehensive Data Model
A well-designed data model serves as the blueprint for your entire infrastructure data sets, defining how information is structured, stored, and accessed. Your model should bend to fit different needs while still working well when things get busy. The way you build your data model has a big impact on how well your data jobs run. It shapes everything from putting data together to breaking it down and making reports.
When building your data model, consider the different levels of abstraction: conceptual, Representational, and physical. The conceptual model gives you a big-picture view of business entities and how they connect, while the logical model goes deeper into specific attributes and relationships.
The physical model turns these ideas into real database structures. Using a bus matrix can help you plan the entire enterprise data model while supporting the step-by-step delivery of individual business processes.
Key points
- Design for flexibility and performance
- Consider conceptual, logical, and physical data models
- Integrate data from multiple sources
- Use human-readable column names and structures
- Implement a bus matrix for planning
- Support both strategic and tactical delivery
3. Choose and Evaluate Your Data Repository and Environments
Selecting the right data repository is a critical decision that impacts the scalability, accessibility, and performance of your infrastructure data sets. This choice involves weighing the pros and cons of data lakes, data warehouses, or hybrid approaches, as well as deciding between on-premises and cloud-based solutions. Each option offers different benefits in terms of data storage, processing capabilities, and cost-effectiveness.
After you’ve picked your data storage, it’s key to keep checking your setups to make sure they still work for what you need as things change. This ongoing check should look at things like how secure it is how you put data in and keep it, and the overall design. By keeping your paperwork up to date and having plans to refresh things, you can make sure your data setups stay at their best and fit what your business needs.
Key points:
- Assess data lake vs. data warehouse vs. hybrid approach
- Consider cloud vs. on-premise solutions
- Review security and access controls
- Evaluate data load and storage strategies
- Create and maintain architecture diagrams
- Document environment refresh strategies
4. Implement Data Quality Management and ETL Processes
Making sure data is high-quality is key to building a data setup you can trust and rely on. This step has an impact on setting up strong methods to clean, check, and improve data as it moves through your system. Using data quality management software and tools that watch for issues on their own can help keep data accurate on a large scale. These tools catch and fix mistakes before they affect later steps or decision-making.
Equally important is the development of efficient ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines. These processes form the backbone of data movement and transformation within your infrastructure. A well-designed ETL pipeline ensures that data is accurately extracted from various sources, transformed to fit your data model, and loaded into your chosen repository. By focusing on security and efficiency in your ETL processes, you can minimize data loss and maintain the overall quality of your big data infrastructure.
Key points:
- Utilize data quality management software
- Implement automated data monitoring tools
- Build secure and efficient ETL pipelines
- Clean and optimize data during ingestion or retrieval
- Ensure data accuracy, completeness, and timeliness
- Monitor data quality throughout the data lifecycle
5. Assess and Optimize Performance
Regular performance assessment is crucial for maintaining an effective and user-friendly database infrastructure. This ongoing process involves monitoring both front-end user experience and back-end system performance. By documenting current runtimes and comparing them to user expectations, you can identify areas for improvement and ensure that your infrastructure meets the needs of its users.
When you try to make things faster, think about quick wins and how to handle growth in the future. You might start loading data bit by bit, trim down your datasets, or rethink how you’ve built things. Automating performance metric tracking can help you proactively identify and address issues before they impact users. Keep in mind that as you get more data and your business changes, you’ll need to look at your setup again and tweak it to keep it running at its best.
Key points:
- Monitor front-end and back-end performance
- Document user expectations and actual runtimes
- Implement incremental loads where possible
- Automate performance metric tracking
- Regularly review and optimize data processes
- Be prepared to revisit architecture and requirements as needs change
6. Implement a Comprehensive Data Governance Strategy
A strong data governance strategy plays a key role in running and controlling your data setup well. It covers many areas, from setting data ownership and care to making rules for data quality, and security, and following laws. By making these steps official, you can make sure everyone in your company does things the same way and gets better at handling data overall.
Putting a good data governance program into action needs a step-by-step plan to roll it out. Begin by setting the limits of your data governance program and build it up as time goes on. The main parts should have data lineage records clear details of what data can do and who owns it, and rules for how to access and use data.
Keep in mind that data governance is an ongoing process and should change as your company’s needs change and the data scene shifts.
Key points:
- Secure leadership buy-in
- Define the scope and initiate the program
- Establish data ownership and stewardship
- Create policies for data quality and security
- Document data lineage and transformations
- Address data availability, usability, and compliance
- Continuously evolve and improve the program
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Choosing Between ETL to ELT Data Infrastructure
Data infrastructure approaches focus on two main approaches: ETL and ELT. Both strategies move data from source to destination while applying business logic, but they differ in their execution.
Let’s start with ETL (Extract, Transform, Load). Here, data is first extracted from a source system, followed by immediate transformations or business logic applications. The transformed data is then loaded into final tables for end users and reporting tools. The extracted source data moves to a temporary storage location, often called the staging layer – essentially another database or schema.
In ELT (Extract, Load, Transform), considered a more modern approach, the workflow changes. Data is extracted and loaded directly into permanent tables rather than temporary staging areas. Transformations are applied to this larger dataset, including custom data model creation.
Key Differences
- Order: ETL transforms before storing, ELT stores before transforming
- Storage: ETL uses temporary storage, ELT uses permanent storage
- Flexibility: ELT allows independent extraction and transformation
However, ETL isn’t obsolete – many companies still successfully use this approach. Changing such infrastructure can be challenging, which explains why numerous organizations continue with ETL architectures. Both approaches remain viable, with the choice depending on specific organizational needs and existing infrastructure.
Best Practices and Tips for Building Robust Data Infrastructure
We have outlined the ten best practices and tips for creating a solid foundation for your data infrastructure model supported by recent insights from industry leaders.
1. Implement a Scalable Architecture
Pro tip: Utilize cloud-based solutions and microservices architecture for flexibility and scalability.
A scalable architecture lets organizations adapt seamlessly to changing data volumes. It provides the flexibility to grow and shrink resources as needed. Scalable architectures are particularly crucial where data generation is exponential and the ability to process and analyze this data can make or break data infrastructure. By implementing a cloud-based scalable architecture, companies can future-proof their data infrastructure and analytics models.
The new LLM models for generative AI need scalable data infrastructure models. (Forbes).
2. Ensure Data Quality
Pro tip: Implement data validation rules, and cleansing processes, and establish a data governance framework.
High-quality data is the lifeblood of accurate analytics, informed decision-making, and effective business operations. Without proper data governance, organizations risk creating low-quality data pipelines that source poor-quality data. This will make decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete information, potentially leading to costly mistakes.
Implementing robust data quality measures ensures that data is accurate, consistent, and reliable across all systems and touchpoints.
For instance, the enterprise data architecture service offered by companies like X-Byte Analytics provides comprehensive data quality and governance solutions. These services include data profiling tools to identify quality issues, data cleansing capabilities to correct errors, and governance frameworks to ensure ongoing data integrity and compliance.
Don't let poor data quality hold you back. Discover how X-Byte Analytics can help you derive quality data with a robust data infrastructure.
3. Prioritize Data Security and Privacy
Pro tip: Implement encryption, access controls, and regular security audits.
Robust security measures protect an organization’s most valuable asset—its data—from unauthorized access, theft, and manipulation. Data privacy and security measures are crucial as infrastructure data sets become more complex and distributed. (spanning multiple cloud environments). Moreover, with the implementation of stringent data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA, ensuring data privacy is also a regulatory obligation.
In the third quarter of 2024 (October-December 2024), 422.61 million data records were leaked worldwide in data breaches.
Many organizations are adopting a “zero trust” security model for their data infrastructure. This approach assumes no user or system should be trusted by default, even if they’re inside the network perimeter. Instead, every access request is verified based on multiple factors before granting access to data or resources.
4. Consider Adopting a Data Mesh Architecture
Pro tip: Implement domain-oriented, self-serve data infrastructure.
Data mesh architecture represents a paradigm shift in how organizations approach data infrastructure and analytics. This decentralized approach moves away from traditional centralized data lakes or warehouses, instead treating data as a product and distributing ownership to domain experts within the organization.
By doing so, data mesh architecture aims to solve common challenges associated with centralized architectures, such as data silos, slow time-to-insight, and the bottleneck of centralized data teams.
It empowers domain teams to own, manage, and serve their data, leading to increased agility, scalability, and ultimately, better utilization of data across the organization.
According to Gartner, by 2025, 70% of organizations will shift from big data to small and wide data, enabling more context for analytics and making AI less data-hungry.
Netflix has been a pioneer in implementing data mesh architecture. They’ve organized their data infrastructure around domain-oriented data teams, each responsible for their data products. This approach has allowed Netflix to scale its data operations efficiently, enabling rapid experimentation and innovation across the organization.
5. Bank on Cloud-Native Technologies
Pro tip: Utilize containerization and serverless computing for data processing and analytics.
Cloud-native technologies for data systems infrastructure offer unparalleled flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. Companies can take advantage of containerization, microservices architecture, and serverless computing to create more resilient and efficient data systems. This approach leads to rapid deployment, easier management, and the ability to pay only for the resources used. According to Gartner, by 2025, 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms.
6. Optimize Data Center Infrastructure Efficiency (DCIE)
Pro tip: Implement efficient cooling systems, optimize server utilization, and use renewable energy sources.
DCIE focuses on maximizing data center operations efficiency while reducing energy consumption and environmental impact. This involves optimizing physical infrastructure, cooling systems, and server utilization. Google has been a leader in data center efficiency, achieving a PUE of 1.10 across all its data centers. They use advanced cooling techniques, like using seawater for cooling in their Finland data center, and have committed to running their data centers on carbon-free energy 24/7 by 2030.
7. Develop a Comprehensive Metadata Management Strategy
Pro tip: Implement a metadata repository and use automated metadata collection tools.
Metadata provides essential context about organizational data, improving discoverability, understanding, and governance. It facilitates data lineage tracking and regulatory compliance. In today’s complex data landscape, effective metadata management reduces time spent locating and utilizing data. LinkedIn’s DataHub is an open-source metadata management platform that showcases the power of comprehensive metadata management.
Foundational Shifts Needed in Data Infrastructure
| Data Understanding
| Cloud Elasticity
| Critical Focus Areas
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| AI Advancements
| Data Automation
| Business Focus
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Conclusion
When building a data infrastructure, prioritize scalability and flexibility to handle growing data volumes and adapt to changing business needs. Ensure seamless integration across systems by adopting industry standards and open data formats. Regular monitoring, maintenance, and optimization are crucial for optimal performance. Here, getting help from one of the reliable data infrastructure companies to Implement data infrastructure processes can be a prudent step. These companies will also help in adhering to compliance requirements like GDPR and CCPA when building your infrastructure.
With X-Byte’s enterprise data architecture services, you get expert guidance on utilizing the full potential of your data assets and creating scalable solutions for growing data volumes.
Don’t let outdated infrastructure hold you back. Transform your data strategy today with a robust data infrastructure model.
