Innovative organizations are taking advantage of data lakes in order to store, centralize, and analyze vast amounts of data. They’re cost-efficient, easy to implement with most data stacks, and they empower all team members by democratizing organizational data.
But like any complex tool in the modern data stack, good architecture determines the real power (or lack thereof) of an organizational data lake. Ensuring performance, compliance and safety, and multi-tool integration requires expertise that many organizations don’t have the time or manpower to provide.
That’s why companies turn to data lake consulting firms to help them design the data lake architecture they need to thrive.
In this article, we’ll discuss what data lakes do, why good architecture matters so much, and what data lake consulting firms like Hakkoda can do to help your organization build a transformative data repository that’s fine-tuned for innovation.
What are Data Lakes, and Why Do They Matter?
A data lake is a repository capable of storing vast amounts of raw data—whether structured, semi-structured, or unstructured—without needing a predefined schema.
While the flexible and cost-efficient storage power of a data lake is its most obvious benefit, it also provides a scalable means of analyzing large amounts of stored data with AI and machine learning in order to generate valuable insights.
Data lakes are distinct from hierarchical data storage systems in that they do not organize data in files or folders, instead making data easily searchable via relevant metadata. By using a flat architecture, data lakes improve performance so that applications can be more effectively used to process and analyze the stored data.
The unique value of data lakes lies in their open format, as well as their low cost and high durability.
- Open Format: Avoids the necessity of “locking in” to proprietary data warehouse, providing crucial flexibility in the modern, multi-tool data environment
- Low Cost/High Durability: Scales and leverages object storage with efficiency that saves operating costs, with the ability to process data in a variety of formats.
The bottom line? A good data lake is a powerful, cost-efficient tool for storing vast amounts of data that can be easily analyzed with sophisticated data tools. Data lakes can be easily integrated into most data stacks, thanks to their unique structure, and they allow a level of accessibility that isn’t possible with other, more fragmented data storage systems.
Optimized Architectures are Everything When It Comes to Data Lakes
Like any powerful data tool, a data lake should be integrated into an organizational data stack with careful, custom engineering. Here are just some of the factors data scientists take into account when optimizing a data lake to deliver organizational value:
- Minimizing data bottlenecks that come from mismanaged metadata and improper data partitioning to keep performance high
- Ensuring compliance, security and governance standards are met within the data lake’s flat architecture to data is stored and analyzed responsibly
- Pairing an organizational data lake with the right tools (machine learning, LLMs, AI analytics tools, and more) during the design phase
Without the proper architecture, a data lake can suffer from slow performance, corrupted data, or simple underutilization. For this reason, organizations will often choose to partner with data lake consulting firms who can offer technical expertise and design collaboration to ensure data lakes are suited to organizational needs.
In working with a data lake consulting firm, organizations can unlock the most powerful capabilities of data lakes: a centralized, democratized repository for organizational data in all formats that’s accessible to all team members (regardless of their data literacy) and always ready to be analyzed for insights.
Landing on an Enterprise Data Architecture with the Right Data Lake Consulting Firm
At Hakkoda, our data lake experts have the technical knowledge and the industry experience to build the data lake architecture your organization needs to thrive.
We aren’t short-term specialists who build complicated data systems and then disappear; we partner with our clients through every phase of design, from ideation to implementation and beyond, ensuring that our architecture delivers the value it was designed to deliver.
That means that we’ll work with your internal data team as we implement your data lake, training them to handle its maintenance in perpetuity. And because we aren’t a one-size-fits-all data lake consulting firm, your data lake will be tailor-made for your organization—built to ensure you have the compliance, performance, and insight you need.
