Data Infrastructure Debt is Hampering Business Returns

There is a great deal of effort and cost associated with keeping technological components up to date and easy to use for more organizational leverage. Some folks estimate that this can reach near 90% of the budget allocated for technology. Every time we add another technological component, the more debt an organization builds. It is excruciating for data infrastructures as data can be used repeatedly to leverage business benefits. It gets in the way of delivering the newly desired outcomes of better customer journeys, more automation for cost savings, and leveraging an organization's resources in new and innovative ways. This post will concentrate on the data infrastructure portion of the technical dept. At the same time, it explores the causes, adverse effects, and how to solve them for data infrastructures and the ever-growing data sprawl.

Data Infrastructure Debt Causes

•        An industry trend implies that modern applications need to be built on top of one or more special-purpose databases, thus adding more technical debt for each database. What makes this particularly difficult when combining and translating data for more use and leverage.
•        Over the past decade, applications have become more data-hungry themselves. As a result, they require particular data dynamics, analytics, and models, implying more cross-use of existing data and new and unique databases.
•         The explosion of free software tempts folks to leverage what software is already there, leading to more unique data infrastructure components. As a result, it creates a specialty database explosion.

Effects of Data Infrastructure Debt

•         Data infrastructure debt is insidious and accumulates fast, and is very difficult to undo. It is a multiplier to the existing debt dragging back initiatives that organizations want.
•         Initiatives that are given the green light are slowed down by the need to aggregate and translate data from many more sources than it would typically take. 
•        Data infrastructure debt keeps the CIO on the sidelines instead of in the critical driver seat for digital efforts in the future. When the CIO is fighting a cost war instead of a results war, digital efforts wane in priority. 
•         We have to hire all the specialty skills to keep the variety of special purpose and legacy databases.
•         The drag causes businesses to set up their own technology efforts. But, unfortunately, they are often naïve to the problems they are creating and throw the debt over the fence to the CIO after making decisions the CIO would not have allowed.

How to Start Solving Data Debt?       

•         It is essential to stop on-boarding new databases even though the software that comes with the new data might be free or low-cost. 
•         Assuming organizations do not want to rip and replace databases immediately but slowly retire many, buying a modern DBMS that works well in the cloud as a No-SQL approach while still supporting SQL commands and databases is ideal.
•         It is not by giving up on innovations and digital transformation efforts by prioritizing these great business outcome efforts overpaying past technical debt. However, it may mean not taking advantage of new features on old databases.

Net; Net:

Smart CIOs are reaching for single modern, scalable relational databases that can support the many needs of applications. It would include mixing real-time data with operational, warehouse, big, and archive data with ease. These databases can operate across cloud providers and on-premises. There is a big trend towards capable databases that can act as a data mesh while reducing the data infrastructure technical debt that promotes unnecessary data sprawl and the difficulties with protecting and leveraging that same data.