How to harness a modern data lake architecture within your hybrid environment

While Gartner is forecasting that worldwide public cloud end-user spending will grow by 21.7% in 2023¹ as it drives business transformation through emerging technologies like generative AI – a hybrid cloud environment is a more viable option for some enterprises.

Sectors like banking, healthcare and government are bound by stringent levels of data compliance. In our experience at Starburst, this means they have petabytes of data on-premise. These factors make for a slower and more complex cloud transition, particularly where data regulations differ across their global locations. 

On the flip side, some large organizations are partially reverting from the public cloud to include on-premise and private cloud solutions because of increasing complexities, vendor lock-in interoperability issues, and spiraling cloud costs – ranging from egress fees to additional AI tools.

Embrace a decentralized data system to garner actionable insights

Whatever direction you’re traveling in, it’s important to leverage the investments you’ve already made to empower your progress toward actionable insights. Especially as it can be time, cost, and labor-intensive to establish a truly data-driven culture. 

When Boston Consulting Group surveyed 300 data leaders, more than 50% cited that the complexity of their architecture is a significant pain point to them leveraging all their data effectively. 

Having new tools may be exciting, but they often solve just one piece of the puzzle. Business intelligence, data lakes, data marks, thousands of ETL jobs running and duplicated data sources. They can leave you drowning in all your data and overburdened with complexities and costs.

As this technology evolves, data and BI teams will be expected to acquire new skill sets. Ultimately, you can end up with hastily assembled complex pipelines to transform raw data or move data and feel like you’re in a perpetual cycle of piecing everything together.

All the data you need to answer all your questions and derive those insights is there, but getting access to it and using it in a meaningful and effective way can be difficult to achieve. This comes back to infrastructure being a critical aspect of leveraging your data.

Data silos are not a new thing. But they continue to be a challenge as we all search for that single source of truth. There’s a way to break these down within your organization and make cost and performance trade-offs as you go.

Embracing a hybrid architecture and a decentralized data ecosystem means you’ll be able to manage your data in an accessible and scalable structure that supports both cloud and on-premise environments simultaneously.

Bringing together cloud and on-premise data sources with Starburst Galaxy connectivity

I am excited to introduce our new Starburst Galaxy at Big Data LDN a few weeks ago. WIth this new capability, organizations will be able to directly query on-remise databases alongside their cloud data sources — providing a unified view to organizations with hybrid data architectures. Check out my sessions below. 

Modern data lakes are built on open source and open file formats, making your data portable. It’s not locked into a single vendor using their proprietary formats. The open source multi-processing engine that shines for data lakes is Trino, originally developed by Facebook analysts – some of whom are our founders at Starburst.

However, it’s also important to acknowledge that self-deploying and managing something like an open source project within a production environment can be highly costly and a substantial challenge for your organization. That’s where we come in. 

Galaxy is our fully managed, enterprise-grade data lake analytics platform powered by Trino. It’s a secure, reliable cloud product, crafted on top of the open source software and optimized for significant performance above and beyond what Trino can offer alone.

Although Galaxy is a SaaS product, its all-new on-premise connectivity gives you one single access point across your hybrid data. It comes with automatic upgrades, universal search and 24/7 support to make sure you have the easiest experience possible –  and back up when you need it.

For example, we’re helping customers join their on-premise databases to their AWS S3 data lakes.We then enhance the data journey by bringing performance on top of Trino with Warp Speed, our smart indexing and caching solution.

We also provide a critical governance layer, Gravity, which helps clients meet stringent regulations across their multiple global locations.

Embracing a hybrid architecture approach will give you the headspace you need to think and act. A modern data lake will become the center of gravity for your data, bringing all data sources together to give you the insights your organization needs, when you need them.

Discover more about Galaxy, our fully-managed data lake analytics platform.

1: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-04-19-gartner-forecasts-worldwide-public-cloud-end-user-spending-to-reach-nearly-600-billion-in-2023