Into the Clouds? Striim moves data to clouds in real time for analytics

Are discussions concerning where cloud services can make the biggest impact on your enterprise proving hard to ignore? Is access to clouds being viewed as more or less a resource to be occasionally tapped for one purpose or another? Or are these discussions leading to greater consideration of clouds for all things data related? As we continue to modernize our traditional server deployments it is becoming more observable that enterprises are beginning to lean on clouds for much more than simply holding temporary files or as a last resort for file backups. Clouds are continuing to flex their muscles in ways enterprises may not have anticipated just a few short years ago, but when it comes to data and the analytics being performed on data, then there is no escaping just how significant a function clouds are providing.

For the NonStop community it has always been about real time processing. The serious world of transaction processing has always been the driver behind the need to process transactions in real time; the customer experience deemed it necessary that interaction with transactions completed successfully in a timely manner. The same can now be said about data; it has as critical a half-life value as have freshly delivered flowers. Leave data in storage too long and the contribution it might have made wilts rapidly. Transactions processed in real time leads to data needing to be analyzed in real time; markets move quickly today and enterprises need to have insights into any such possible movement and that can only be achieved with real time data analytics.

In the post A Brief Overview of Real-time Data Jessie de Carlos, VP of Solution Consulting at Striim, highlights the contribution access to data in real time can have on the enterprise:

Real-time data is gaining prominence because it can help end-users to make decisions on the fly, allowing for more accurate and faster decision-making. 

Real-time data refers to delivering information to end-users instantly after data is collected and is mainly used to perform real-time analytics. 

Real-time data allows companies to adopt a proactive approach. Access to real-time data means they can make decisions based on the latest data to address their inefficiencies and empower their end-users to be well informed. 

Real-time data allows you to adopt a proactive approach to how you manage your organization’s assets. You can use it to predict, prevent, and identify machinery and components that are failing, service spikes, and other infrastructural issues. By detecting these issues earlier, your teams can address them smoothly and quickly before they snowball into problems of epic proportions. 

Apart from helping to eliminate the silo-ing of data, as has been the case with traditional systems operating independently, the enterprise can benefit from the analytics performed in real time across every aspect of their daily lives interacting with their customers:

You can use this availability of real-time data to support customer requests and respond to customer questions with real-time information from drivers, deliveries, and operations. Real-time insights can help you provide real-time tracking capabilities to customers that let them view the position of their goods at each stage, from order confirmation to doorstep delivery. Customers can also use instant communication to chat with their delivery driver to get delivery on their preferred schedule. 

When it comes to betterment of the customer experience, this is the theme of the second post by Jessie de Carlos, How Can Real-Time Customer Analytics Lead To More Optimized and Refined Customer Experiences? , where access to data is not just a contribution to the enterprise but an enabler of greater insight into just how well your products and services are being received by your customers:

With data analytics, companies can deliver a real-time experience across all touchpoints that’s guided by data-driven insights. This way, they can have a competitive advantage that helps them to sell more, engage more effectively with customers, and boost customer retention. 

And with observable retention practices, a level of loyalty can be determined where that can go both ways – extremely loyal and subject to “rewards” or the exact opposite:

With real-time analytics, you can strengthen this bond. One way to do this is by redeeming loyalty rewards in real time. Loyalty programs generate large amounts of data that can be used to discover plenty of useful insights. 

Similarly, you can also use real-time analytics to identify stores where loyalty programs fail to generate desired results. This gives you an opportunity to improve your marketing based on the demographic and behavioral data for a store or location. 

Of course, adoption can put off some enterprises:

Therefore, start small by focusing on a few use cases and prioritize them. For this purpose, Striim can be a strategic ally that can address your concerns by showing how you can build a real-time infrastructure that can improve your customer experience.  

It is with the recognition that data created in real time needs to be analyzed in real time and turning to real time analytics requires a lot of data from many sources for meaningful results it is at this point that clouds enter the conversation. There is a growing number of analytic tools and services that are solely cloud based and Striim has just announced support for two solutions that may be beneficial to those NonStop users looking to start small.

Should your enterprise be looking to capitalize on Google and its cloud services then Striim for BigQuery may be an option:

Create your first data pipeline in minutes with a no-code solution optimized for BigQuery users.

Heterogeneous sources can be streamed in real time – with high performance parallel Striim writes to BigQuery for maximum write throughput.  Infinitely scale as your business expands, without any additional planning or cost, to execute so you save time and money.

For those NonStop users with strong connections to Microsoft, there is support today in Striim for the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform:

Microsoft Azure enterprise customers have immediate access to critical business data in real time.

With continuous, streaming data integration from on-premises and cloud enterprise sources to Azure analytics tools

Striim has joined the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform partner ecosystem.

For more information on these latest announcements or to read the blog posts in full just follow the highlighted hyperlinks above. Should you have any questions about Striim meeting your needs to stream data created in real time to clouds for the purposes of performing analytics in real time then don’t hesitate to reach out to the Striim team. Each of us would be only too happy to hear from you, anytime on any matter related to data and to ensuring data created on NonStop better integrates with today’s modern world of cloud computing.

Edward Trainor
Sr Director of Global Alliances, Striim Inc.