Now that companies are getting a better handle on extracting value from mountains of customer data for their own business operations and marketing purposes, they are taking the next steps in learning how to capitalize on that very same data as a resalable asset. According to Accenture, “…payment providers have a treasure trove of customer data at their fingertips,” and to monetize that data will require that they take “advantage of distinctive data sets and apply advanced analytics techniques” from multiple sources. These new techniques are enabling companies in all industries to monetize years of valuable data assets (e.g., customer, market, historical, genealogical, etc.) via fee-based access.
These and other digital business models are predominately based on data exchanges, which are now a pre-requisite for doing digital business at scale. Since moving data around the world can be expensive and impractical, then its ability to “exchange access” to data with customers and business partners becomes critical to a company’s ability to realize the full value of its data.
This new perspective on making data more useful and profitable can lead to a number of market forces that will change how companies handle and protect their data assets, including:
The challenges of exchanging data assets
Combining data from disparate sources into meaningful information and delivering it so it can be monetized and exchanged with trusted business partners can set into motion a variety of new challenges for most companies. Accessing multiple types of data from numerous sources and locations, in either an event-based or time-scheduled manner, places a significant burden on existing enterprise data infrastructures and services, particularly those that are centralized in one location. For businesses to effectively and efficiently reap optimal value from their data assets, they will need to:
Deploying data exchanges and integration at the edge
By leveraging an Interconnection Oriented Architecture™ (IOA®) strategy, you can deploy a data exchange and integration platform at your company’s digital edge, where digital commerce, population centers and business ecosystems meet.
Data exchanges are groups of companies (“ecosystems”) that are securely interconnected in an edge node (“interconnection hub”) for the purpose of accessing/sharing data that can be monetized. New data sources are valuable to these data-oriented partners, and these relationships create “data gravity” as data attracts more data, as well as the digital partners and services that stand to gain from accessing that data. Also, as in analytical processing, more data sources directly translate into more experience (e.g., IoT data, scientific data, medical trial data) and greater value from the insights and information it produces. Even if translation between data sources is not required and data is passed straight through, the other governance functions and controls made available within the business ecosystem can provide significant value and needed oversight in a dynamic, automated data environment.
A data integration platform essentially takes data sources from a number of supported source interfaces (i.e., file, database, object store, etc.), transforms it into a universal format and then uses data services within a digital edge node to provide various consumer, API-enabled interfaces to access the data. This approach has already created widespread value in organizations that frequently need to integrate data between disparate applications in one or more clouds.
The design pattern below illustrates how you can deploy data exchanges and integration at your digital edge.
Data Exchanges and Integration at the Digital Edge
Take the following steps to develop a data exchange and integration infrastructure at the edge:
By implementing this data exchange and integration infrastructure design pattern for monetizing data assets, you will realize the following benefits:
Data exchange and integration use case
One of many use cases for data exchanges and integration infrastructures is the fast-evolving digital payments ecosystem. It consists of credit card networks, issuing and acquiring banks, processors, payment gateways, mobile and fixed line point of sales devices, mobile wallets, fraud and identity, and integrated solutions providers.
Key characteristics of the digital payments ecosystem are:
This and other industry-specific use cases can leverage an IOA data exchange and integration infrastructure design pattern to gain direct and secure access to critical data assets for monetization, or any other business expansion purposes.
In the next blog article on managing data at the edge, we’ll discuss how to leverage data orchestration and data provenance to facilitate and track data flows and consumption from disparate sources across the data fabric.
In the meantime, visit the IOA Knowledge Base for vendor-neutral blueprints that take you step-by-step through the right patterns for your architecture, or download the IOA Playbook. If you’re ready to begin architecting for the digital edge now, contact an Equinix Global Solutions Architect.
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