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Enterprise Data Lake

Architecture, Tech Stack, Use Cases

In big data since 2013, ScienceSoft builds secure and scalable data lakes to help businesses across 30+ industries efficiently store, manage and analyze ever-growing volumes of enterprise data.

Enterprise Data Lake - ScienceSoft
Enterprise Data Lake - ScienceSoft

Enterprise Data Lake Adoption

The enterprise data lake market was estimated at $3.74B in 2020 and is expected to reach $17.6B by 2026, at a CAGR of 29.9%.

The main use cases for enterprise data lakes

  • Aggregation and storage of massive datasets, including XaaS data, clickstream data, sensor readings and other IoT data, etc.
  • Data science and advanced analytics: the voluminous data stored in a data lake can be used for further exploration and analysis (e.g., for data warehousing and exploratory data analysis).
  • Serving operational applications driven by real-time data, such as recommendation engines and fraud detection tools.

What Is an Enterprise Data Lake?

An enterprise data lake is a flexible centralized repository for enterprise data in its raw format: structured, semi-structured, or unstructured. With this solution, companies don't have to discard enterprise data just because there is no clear business use for it yet: a lake makes it possible to store voluminous data cost-efficiently and use it for in-depth analysis when needed.

Enterprise Data Lake Architecture: Key Zones

Depending on the data management objectives and the tech systems already in place, an enterprise data lake can be used not only for data storage but also for data transformation and processing.

NB! A data lake is not supposed to compete with or replace an enterprise data warehouse – on the contrary, the tech solutions work best when they complement each other. To learn more about the differences between these two types of systems, check out a dedicated article by Alex Bekker, ScienceSoft's Head of Data Analytics.

Below, we outline a sample architecture of an enterprise data lake, which is organized into four major zones.

Enterprise Data Lake Architecture

  • A landing zone holds raw data ingested from multiple data sources. Only data engineers and data scientists can access this zone.
  • A staging zone is present when primary data normalization is needed. Here, raw data from the landing zone gets cleaned (e.g., erroneous readings from IoT sensors are filtered out). Plus, the staging zone can ingest data from external or internal sources if it doesn't require preprocessing (e.g., customer reviews from an ecommerce website).
  • An analytics sandbox is a secure environment that allows data scientists to explore the data, try different approaches to analysis and assess the results, build and test ML models to experiment with large datasets without affecting the production environment.
  • A curated data zone stores cleansed, processed data converted into conforming dimensions or master lists (e.g., organizing the street number and name, apartment unit, city, zip code, and country into a single address field). With custom scripts or data quality and ETL tools, cleansing operations can be more sophisticated: e.g., data verification and handling conflicting information from different data sources.

NB! As the curated data zone stores processed data, it is sometimes considered a part of an enterprise data warehouse. Still, for some use cases requiring large-scale queries with access to data details (e.g., predictive maintenance, fraud detection, customer segmentation), running the entire analytical process in the data lake ensures speed and cost-efficiency.

Head of Data Analytics Department at ScienceSoft

Enterprise data lakes tend to become data swamps if not managed properly. Thus, when architecting a data lake, it's imperative to plan out robust data governance, including security and metadata management policies and processes.

Reliable Techs and Tools We Use to Develop Enterprise Data Lakes

ScienceSoft: Here To Help You Turn Enterprise Data into a Valuable Asset

What makes ScienceSoft different

We achieve project success no matter what

ScienceSoft does not pass off mere project administration for project management, which, unfortunately, often happens on the market. We practice real project management, achieving project success for our clients no matter what.

See how we do that

How Market Leaders Benefit from Enterprise Data Lakes: a Success Story

Coca-Cola Andina Drives Enterprise Decision-Making with AWS Data Lake

One of South America's leading Coca-Cola bottlers built an AWS-based data lake to consolidate 95% of its enterprise data from SAP ERP, CSV files, and legacy databases. Using ML tools to analyze the aggregated data, the company got valuable insights to boost the efficiency of promotions, improve the customers' shopping experience, and achieve an 80% increase in the analytics team's productivity.

Key techs: Amazon S3, Amazon Athena, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB

Consider Professional Services for Your Enterprise Data Lake Journey

Relying on 35 years in data analytics and 11 years in big data, ScienceSoft can help you design a solid data lake architecture, join you at any stage of enterprise data lake engineering, or take over its end-to-end implementation.

Enterprise data lake consulting

ScienceSoft's experts will map out an efficient enterprise data management strategy, plan a secure and resilient architecture for your data lake, help you choose the best-fitting tech stack, and prepare a detailed project roadmap with valuable advice on risk mitigation for each step.

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Enterprise data lake development

ScienceSoft is ready to deliver a turnkey enterprise data lake solution, covering everything from architecture design to QA and secure deployment. We also offer long-term support to ensure unfailing data lake performance and smoothly tune it to your evolving data management needs.

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3 Things That Become Possible with an Enterprise Data Lake

More data, cheaper storage. Unlike traditional databases or data warehouses, enterprise data lakes can cost-efficiently accommodate heterogeneous data at any scale.

Safe data experiments. Data scientists and engineers can run experiments in an analytics sandbox without affecting the production environment.

Easy adoption of advanced techs such as ML and AI for predictive analytics, fraud detection, image analysis, and more.

Need to Estimate Your Enterprise Data Lake Costs?

ScienceSoft's consultants are ready to calculate the cost and ROI of your enterprise data lake initiative to help you accurately estimate the project budget.