Three Of The Biggest Barriers To Getting The Most Out Of Data Lakes Posted on : Apr 09 - 2019

Has your company implemented a data lake? It wouldn’t be a surprise. With the rise in big data demands, a data lake implementation has the potential to improve analytics, create wider data availability and produce more efficient data throughput.

Unfortunately, many companies fail to realize the true benefits of data lakes and are left disappointed. Organizations that lack the infrastructure, segmentation or even a clear use case for their data lake could be missing out. Luckily, new strategies can help solve these shortcomings.

Here are the changes your company can make to overcome the biggest barriers to data lakes and get the most out of your implementation:

Lacking A Clear Data Lake Use Case

Since data lakes don’t have the same restrictions as database management systems, there doesn’t need to be any defined storage structure. However, this can promote poor data governance that leads to no organization and makes security and access more difficult.

A big reason for this is most organizations don’t have clear use cases for their data lake. This results in it not being used to its full potential. Set some governance structure and schemas related to your initial use cases that still allow you to store unstructured data and remain flexible for yet-to-be-determined future scenarios.

Setting a more loose, flexible schema -- while still providing the ability to store unstructured data -- makes it easier for your existing analytics to draw on a much richer data set. Processing previously unavailable and unstructured data that isn’t restricted by a set schema offers endless ways to query data for any use case. In fact, an Aberdeen report found that companies with a data lake in place were more likely to report more sophisticated, powerful analytics.

Building An Unsegmented Data Lake

A problem many organizations run into is offering too diverse of a data pool for departments to draw from. When you have access to every piece of data generated by the entire organization and don’t have the right schema in place to organize it, your data lake can quickly turn into a data swamp that no one takes advantage of.

However, eliminating data silos allows you to share data across departments to offer richer data access to everyone. Creating a single, unified data storage solution across the entire organization is crucial for a data-driven organization. View More