Artificial Intelligence is driving business Data Management

Denodo has launched a new report revealing that 51% of UK organizations plan to expand their adoption of AI-based solutions. These solutions empower data consumers and data stewards, enabling them to achieve ease of use, which is essential in the context of Data Democracy.

The report, titled “The Denodo Data Gap Report, 2023” investigates how organizations use their data and also uncovers their challenges and preferences around data management. The study is based on a survey of professionals from 500 large companies across the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. The company, whose AI/ML offerings stand out as one of the most innovative features of the Denodo Platform, presented the report during Denodo DataFest, a conference that welcomed data experts and clients from across Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, between 25th – 26th October in Barcelona.

The report identifies the main challenges that organizations face when managing data, the most notable being automation in complex environments, meeting regulatory compliance and lack of skilled data management in-house staff. In the UK, legacy IT infrastructure is one of the biggest challenges to data management, according to the UK companies surveyed.

The majority of large companies across Europe (71%) agree that data only becomes important when all staff can easily access it, whilst 69% also think that traditional architectures are beginning to lose value in a world that produces data faster than ever before.

“Facilitating the evolution from a physical to a logical data fabric is at the core of our mission. Therefore, we firmly believe that it is no longer sustainable to waste time trying to discover where data is located, what it represents and how it can be accessed – what companies need is to be able to easily and immediately access all the data they need, regardless of its location, format and other technological, syntactic and semantic complexities”, says Charles Southwood Regional Vice President, Northern Europe - Denodo.

Data democratization and governance in organizations

In this era of data-driven transformation, data democratization allows business decisions to be accurate, timely and based on available data. However, it is a complex process that affects all dimensions of the company, and, therefore, it must be planned in a balanced and coherent way.

72% of those surveyed say that the most effective data platform includes a catalogue, menu or reference guide, allowing anyone to easily understand what data is available and what it represents.

Data governance is taking on a very important role for companies around the world. Specifically, 54% of UK companies consider one of the main advantages of an organization having a formal Data Management Policy as being able to comply with current security and privacy regulations (e.g. GDPR), whilst 44% say being able to integrate information from multiple sources in a more agile way and being able to improve consistency and cooperation across multiple teams (41%) are another two main advantages of this.

"With the speed at which the world moves and data is generated, companies need a new way of managing it, which allows them to simplify what is increasingly complex. This is due to the enormous variability of the data, its ubiquity on the Internet, to the different ways in which it can be used or to the expanded audience of users typical of a democratization scenario. We can no longer postpone the establishment of a new modern approach to managing data, which displays agility, clarity, simplicity and efficiency, and in which consumer needs can occupy a central place in development”, concludes Charles Southwood Regional Vice President, Northern Europe - Denodo.

Large companies’ road to innovation

Large companies across Europe seem to appreciate new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, so much so that over a quarter (79%) of companies in the UK are already using AI and ML based solutions to support Data Management to some degree. 43% are planning to increase the usage of those technologies, while 16% are currently not using them but plan to deploy some within the next six months.

The UK is no exception. While 38% of large companies are already relying on AI and ML and plan to use these even more, another 13% who do not currently use AI and ML are planning to implement these solutions in the coming months.

On the other hand, the success of hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, while allowing greater efficiency and flexibility, also raises the problem of what is the best way to migrate data and applications to different platforms. Minimizing the impact of these migrations is key so that the underlying changes are not even noticeable.

The report also found that during migrations, 35% of UK companies use a hybrid environment to store data, 30% use a private cloud, 19% use a multi-cloud environment, 20% use cloud environments public and nearly a quarter (24%) store the data in their own facilities.

Organizations from various countries exhibit varying levels of concern when it comes to replicating existing data silos in a cloud environment. Among them, French companies stand out as the most apprehensive, with 78% expressing unease. In comparison, German organizations follow closely behind at 66%, while the UK and Spain express slightly lower levels of concern at 60% and 56%, respectively. On the other hand, Italian organizations appear to be the least worried, with only 45% expressing apprehension.