In this article, the chief technology officer at Merkle, Matt Mobley, walks you through six critical ways to think about data platforms, including cloud-first, scalability, and rapid adaption, to be ready for anything in the coming year.
At the beginning of 2020, a lot of marketers were already playing catch up. The Martech industry was evolving faster with each passing year, and it was challenging marketing departments – and the data platforms that support them – to keep up.
Of course, as the year went on, things got a lot more complicated than that. Amid a global pandemic, there was suddenly an even higher premium on the marketers’ ability to quickly respond in the face of major business changes. They needed to quickly scale up or scale down services at the right time. They needed flexibility and agility in their tools. And they needed new access to data from across the business.
In short, this upheaval brought to light a number of weaknesses in the data platforms marketers relied on, leaving many organizations struggling to adapt to the never-ending changes. A key reason for this is that these systems did not follow the right architectural principles, to begin with.
Learn More: 12 Ways to Truly Help Marketers Leverage Customer Data PlatformsOpens a new window
6 Core Components of the Modern Data Platform
Getting the data right at the data platform level helps optimize the value of marketers’ investments in the broader Martech ecosystem. Being able to adapt to today’s marketing environment means designing a data platform that:
1. Starts with cloud-first:
The foundation for the modern data platform is cloud-first. Cloud provides the critical characteristics of flexibility, agility, scale, and tools to create more efficient workloads in support of the modern data platform. It is how data platforms can match the agility that marketing organizations need to respond in the current marketplace.
2. Is built for now:
In the past, businesses would make large hardware and software investments to support their marketing efforts. They often looked at a three-year timeline to achieve an appropriate return on the investment. With the pace of change in marketing, this meant trying to predict the unpredictable of what will be happening in three years. With the cloud, this mindset completely changes, instead of enabling organizations to build for now by focusing on immediate impact and outcomes for the business.
3. Enables scalability for the future:
Modern data platforms are built on the strategic and architectural concept of continual development. They are living, breathing solutions built on multiple changeable pieces instead of monoliths meant to cover all possible use cases. With the cloud, organizations can build, launch, and make changes to scale their marketing capabilities for the future.
4. Supports rapid adaption:
Modern data platforms on the cloud enable businesses to be flexible, build for impact now, and scale for the future. They also enable organizations to rapidly adapt and change the platform to address new and unexpected business needs.
5. Empowers business users:
Modern data platforms empower business users by giving them access to the data they need without having to call on the IT department to get it. The platform enables IT to manage risk and compliance but prevents these efforts from inhibiting the business. The technical function of the business is data science; we need to enable the data scientist. They can inject technical aptitude into the business so that the company can control its destiny.
Learn More: Big Data Analytics in Retail To Be Worth Nearly $18 Billion by 2027: Research Reveals
6. Connects all the data
Optimizing data assets plays a big role in helping businesses to be successful. A modern data platform connects all of your data assets together—whether it is first, second, or third party. Through data integration and engineering efforts, it should also have the tools to further enhance data; for example, identity resolution, which brings data together through private identity graphs to provide a single view of data.
Modern Data Moves in 2021
Now is the time to move forward with a modern data platform. Building traditional monolithic data platforms in today’s Martech environment is a mistake. Before it is even up and running, it is already a legacy component. By applying the six pillars of modern data platforms, marketers can gain the data capabilities they need to be ready for anything in 2021 and beyond.