Data Architecture Principles

The definition of data architecture principles entails designing, structuring, managing, and securing data infrastructure while gaining value by utilizing them.

Digital Analytics
-
8 min
Digital Analytics
/
Data Architecture Principles

The organization of a system's data assets and data management resources is referred to as its data architecture. Modern data architecture is proactive in its design, anticipating complex data requirements while always considering scalability and flexibility.

Data architecture principles are all about designing, structuring, and optimizing data for analytics initiatives to generate business value.

The principles of modern data architecture can be used to help you handle the huge amount of data and decisions made upon them in the present era, regardless of whether you are in charge of data, systems, analysis, strategy, or outcomes. 

You may consider them the framework for the data architecture that will enable your company to operate at its best today and in the future.

Let us see what are the data principle architecture and how can we leverage them to help us perform efficiently when dealing with data. 

Data architecture principles

The concepts of the data architecture principles aren't set in stone because the data itself is evolving over time.  As of the present day, there are a few principles that engineers consider important and think we should master.

The principles of modern data architecture for today's data-driven market are listed below in descending order of significance, but the list is not exhaustive.

Make Data a shareable asset 

The purpose of having data is to use it, whether to support decision-making, provide insights, or create more sophisticated processes and outperform your competition. If not leveraged correctly, data silos might turn to become the demise of an effective organization. 

These organizations need to make sure that all parties have a thorough understanding of the company rather than permitting departmental data silos to continue.

The easiest method to ensure organizational stakeholders have access to the data they need to generate insights and have a full view of the business is to remove any departmental data silos or other business units in between.

Ensure security and access controls

The rise of unified data platforms such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, and Hadoop has forced the implementation of data policies and access restrictions directly on the raw data, rather than in a network of downstream data storage and applications.

Highly secure self-service access is becoming more and more essential in response to the demands for broadly accessible real-time data in today's world.

Nowadays many technological solutions allow Data architecture by providing built-in security and self-service features without sacrificing access control.

Always make sure to look up technologies that can deliver self-service access while also providing built-in security features which do not compromise control.

Provide the right User Interface for easy Data utilization

Storing data in a single location does not necessarily imply that consumers may consume it. To enable individuals to gain something of value from a shared data asset, we must provide interfaces that make it simple for users to consume that data.

The key is to allow your employees to use the technology they are familiar with and that is appropriate for the tasks at hand aiming to.

This can be done through an OLAP (online analytical processing) interface, a real-time API for various targeting systems, an SQL interface suitable for data analysts, or the R language for data scientists.

Eliminate Data Copies and Movement

It is always preferable to move data as little as possible. Every organization strives to perform better in every way, especially in delicate and sensitive departments like the data department.

Unpleasant situations can be avoided, and the cost of data architectures can be reduced if data transfer is eliminated or at least minimized. 

A further effect of reducing data migration is that the enterprise's data agility will be improved overall.

Curate the data

The process of producing, arranging, and managing data sets so that users who are looking for information can access and use them is known as data curation.

End users may have a disappointing experience without adequate data curation, which involves modeling significant relationships, cleaning raw data, and curating critical dimensions and metrics.

You can increase your chances of maximizing the benefit of the shared data asset by making investments in key operations that carry out data curation.

The rise in data volumes and the complexity of data sources can overwhelm businesses and data curation helps prevent this.

We should remember that Data curation is an essential part of an enterprise data strategy from a business standpoint since it ensures that the organization can use its data effectively and adhere to data-related security and regulatory obligations.

Establish a common vocabulary

Since data architecture designs are intended to be flexible and adaptable, distinct data functions and features may have different labels according to the organizational context.

By investing in data, organizations may and should develop a standard vocabulary that will enable data analysis to be understood by a wide range of users within the company.

Regardless of how users consume or evaluate the data, product catalogs, fiscal calendar dimensions, provider hierarchies, and KPI definitions must all be uniform. 

Otherwise, you'll spend more time arguing over or resolving results without this common terminology than you will be promoting higher performance in your organization.

The conclusion

Just as everything related to tech needs to be planned and prepared for future trends and developments, there are a few characteristics to bear in mind while designing and developing data architecture in light of the emerging innovations in the tech sector.

Contemporary data architectures ought to be built to support elastic scaling, high availability, end-to-end security for both data in motion and data at rest, as well as cost and performance scalability.

These and other details must be considered before beginning to develop today's modern data architecture infrastructures.

Contact us for more information on how Adservio can help you design and build modern data architecture.

Published on
September 21, 2022

Industry insights you won’t delete. Delivered to your inbox weekly.

Other posts