September 1, 2020 - Blog

The Modern Data Platform: Finding Your Truth

In our current and ever-changing environment, the only real certainty we have is that nothing is certain

Today’s business leaders must accept multiple truths within an uncertain and often unstable environment. How they leverage the data in their business is key to this. 

At this point, every organisation is aware of the importance of data due to the endless blogs, articles, and thought pieces on the explosion of data in recent years. However, some organisations struggle with ring-fencing, wrangling, and extracting the type of information that will help to drive informed business decisions and give them a competitive advantage in their market.

Single source of the truth: Is it still relevant?

To enable insights from data across all of their disparate sources, organisations would traditionally invest heavily in a set of tools and governance procedures that allowed them to surface this data in what was known as a single source of truth (SSOT). It would typically be surfaced by a BI tool on top of a data warehouse that would be used by the business to generate insights. Such data should be of high value and importance, where a level of control and governance is required to ensure accuracy. Many organisations still rely on this platform every day to give them the information they need to run their business.

What about multiple sources of the truth?

SSOT relies on one “unchallengeable” source within your organisation to deliver all crucial data needed to run your business. When we talk about multiple sources of the truth (MSOT), we’re not referring to alternative facts but instead utilising technologies to analyse our known information (the SSOT) with data that’s relatively untapped, and imbuing this with relevance by putting it into some form of context.

These contextual datasets allow businesses to explore their data further, answer deep analytical questions and offer responses to unique requirements, which they couldn’t previously.

How can a Modern Data Platform accommodate this?

Leveraging the power of cloud computing and Version 1’s Modern Data Platform enables organisations to bring a set of tools to the fore to ingest, store, process, and analyse all data across their estate with agility, no matter the structure, size, or context. We can apply this concept to your known data as well as your lesser-known data.

The democratisation of this data and empowering your users with the required platform and tools is the precursor to driving insights from your data that are otherwise untapped. So, to answer my earlier question: Is a single source of truth still relevant? Absolutely, but why stop there.

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