Manage your data to get better

At the beginning of data science and data analytics projects, once the objectives are established, work begins as teams find, organize, and prepare the data for their actual analytics work. Inevitably, the teams find that the data they need is stored in different databases and repositories, in different formats, and even in different clouds or data centers. Even if the data was all in the same place, it is rarely in a form where it is ready for dashboard visualizations or as machine learning model training data, so data processing work needs to be done.

Data science teams widely recognize the data challenges in the initial phases of their projects. In fact, 39% of respondents to 451 Research’s “Voice of the Enterprise: AI and Machine Learning” survey said they believe this stage of the AI process to be the most demanding in relation to their underlying infrastructure, compared to 34% for training and 27% for inferencing. As such, by selecting and configuring a database that is designed to support more efficient data ingestion and preparation, data architects can help accelerate the development of AI applications.

How can Cloud Pak for Data help?

What is Cloud Pak for Data? At a high level, it’s an Enterprise Insights Platform (EIP) that runs on any vendor’s cloud and any infrastructure. If EIP is a new term to you, know that many industry analysts and consultants like Forrester and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) have recently started using this term as a category for integrated sets of data management, analytics, and development tools.

The first core tenet of Cloud Pak for Data is that you can run it anywhere. You can co-locate it where you are making your infrastructure investments. This means you can deploy Cloud Pak for Data on every major cloud vendor’s platform, including Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and IBM Cloud. You can also deploy on-premises for the case that you are developing a hybrid cloud approach. Finally, on IBM Cloud, you can subscribe to Cloud Pak for Data as-a-Service if you need a fully managed option, where you only pay for what you use. With Cloud Pak for Data, your organization has the deployment flexibility to run anywhere.

Cloud Pak for Data is built on the foundation of Red Hat OpenShift. This provides the flexibility for customers to scale across any infrastructure using the worlds leading open-source steward: Red Hat. Red Hat OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based platform that allows IBM to deploy software through a container-based model delivering greater agility, control, and portability.

IBM’s Cloud Pak offerings all share a common control plane, which makes administration and integration of diverse services easy. Cloud Pak for Data includes a set of pre-integrated data services that allow you to collect information from any repository (databases, data lakes, data warehouses, you name it). The design point here is for customers to leave the data in all the places where it already resides, but to its users it seems like the enterprise data is in one spot.

Once all your enterprise data has been connected, industry-leading data organization services can be deployed that allow for the development of an enterprise data catalog. This capability enables a “shop for data” like experience and enforces governance across all data sources. Enabling data consumers to have a single place to go for all their data needs.

With your enterprise data connected and cataloged, Cloud Pak for Data presents a wide variety of data analysis tools out of the box. For example, there is a wealth of data science capabilities that cater to all skill levels (meaning no-code, low-code, and all code). Users can quickly grab data from the catalog and instantly start working towards generating insights in a common workflow built around the “project” concept.

For additional capabilities, there are a large set of extended services available for Cloud Pak for Data that present more specialized data management and analytics capabilities. These range from powerful IBM solutions, like Planning Analytics to solutions from IBM partners, like Palantir (creating a business ontology) and DataStax (open-source database).

Want to learn more about IBM Cloud Pak for Data or if you would like us to help you challenge your cloud & data strategy, please contact us.