Every Company is a Data Processing Company

Remember when we used to say, "Every company is a software company"? Well, we're taking it up a notch: Every company is now a data processing company.

Consider an example: Domino's Pizza. They're in the business of making and delivering pizzas, right?

Wrong. Domino's has transformed itself into a tech company that happens to sell pizza. They've leveraged data to optimize everything from their supply chain to their delivery routes. Their digital ordering channels, which account for over 65% of their orders, collect and process vast amounts of data to improve customer experience and operational efficiency.

But here's the thing: it's not just about having data. It's also about having a reliable data platform to process, analyze, and act on that data. And that's where things get interesting.

The Hidden Costs of an Unreliable Data Platform

Consider a healthcare provider using predictive analytics to manage patient care. If their data platform isn't reliable, they might miss critical patterns in patient data, leading to suboptimal care decisions. The consequences here aren't just financial – they're potentially life-altering.

Or imagine you're running a large e-commerce platform. It's the holiday season, and suddenly your data platform hiccups. You can't process transactions, recommend products, or update inventory in real-time. The result? Millions in lost sales, frustrated customers, and a logistics nightmare that'll haunt your operations team for weeks.

These failures don't just impact your data team. They ripple across your entire organization, from marketing to finance to customer service. It's a domino effect that can topple your business faster than you can say "data breach."

The Anatomy of a Data Platform

So, what exactly goes into a data platform? It's more than just a fancy database and some colorful dashboards. You need robust data collection and storage, powerful processing and analysis tools, clear visualization and reporting, and – crucially – orchestration and workflow management.

But building and managing a data platform isn't a walk in the park. You're constantly battling issues such as scaling, ensuring reliability, managing diverse data sources, maintaining performance under pressure, handling complex workflow dependencies, and monitoring it all without losing your mind.

In this article we’ll focus on the orchestration piece.

Orchestration: The Beating Heart of Data Platforms

Let's be clear: orchestration isn't just about scheduling jobs. It's the central nervous system of your entire data operation.

Why is an orchestration tool, often confused with a simple scheduler, the unsung hero of data platforms?

• Workflow intelligence: Modern orchestration tools don't just run tasks, they understand the relationships between them. They can automatically determine the optimal order of operations, manage complex dependencies across disparate systems, and dynamically adjust workflows based on data volume or data quality.
• Resource optimization: Gone are the days of static resource allocation. Advanced orchestration platforms can be configured to distribute workloads across your infrastructure, scale resources up or down as needed, and minimize idle time while maximizing cost efficiency.
• Fault tolerance and recovery: In the world of big data, failures are inevitable. The right orchestration tool will enable engineers to implement custom retry logic, provide transactional guarantees ensuring data consistency, and offer point-in-time recovery, allowing you to resume workflows from where you left off.
• Observability and monitoring: Orchestration platforms should offer deep insights into your data operations. They provide real-time monitoring of task progress, offer metrics to forecast potential bottlenecks, and employ automations to alert you to possible issues before they become critical failures.
• Security and compliance: In an era of stringent data regulations, orchestration tools enforce access controls and data governance policies, provide audit trails for data workflows, and ensure workflow lineage tracking for regulatory compliance.

Beyond Simple Scheduling: The ROI of Advanced Orchestration

Investing in a robust orchestration solution isn't a sunk cost—it's a strategic imperative that delivers returns for a data team today and as it scales. Implementing the right orchestration platform will result in:

• Operational efficiency: Advanced orchestration reduces manual interventions by automating responses to common issues, freeing up your team for higher-value work. It accelerates development cycles, enabling data scientists and engineers to deploy models and pipelines faster because they have more control and visibility. Moreover, it minimizes downtime by catching and resolving issues quickly, ensuring business continuity.
• Cost savings: Advanced orchestration can significantly reduce cloud compute costs through efficient use of resources on an as-needed basis. It also improves team productivity by reducing time spent on maintenance and troubleshooting. See automated infrastructure cleanup jobs, for example.
• Risk mitigation: Advanced orchestration enhances compliance by helping meet regulatory requirements through role-based and fine-grained access controls. These access controls reduce the risk of data breaches that can be extremely damaging. Infrastructure guardrails for secure, repeatable workflow authoring can be put into place to provide compliance and unblock data teams.
• Business agility: With advanced orchestration, you can achieve faster time-to-insight by reducing the time from data ingestion to actionable insights. It enables seamless scaling, allowing you to easily adapt to growing data volumes and changing business needs. Furthermore, it future-proofs your operations by enabling quick integration of new data sources and technologies as they emerge.

A real world example of orchestration ROI

Progressive Insurance, a leader in the insurance industry, faced significant challenges with their traditional data warehouse technology. Their data engineers struggled with dependencies and fragmented tools, which slowed down the implementation of new projects. The lack of a centralized control plane not only impacted developer velocity but also business outcomes. Recovery from failures was slow and inconsistent, often requiring specialized knowledge across multiple tools.

By modernizing their data platform with Prefect, Progressive saw remarkable improvements:

1. Dramatic error reduction: After implementing Prefect, Progressive experienced an impressive 80% reduction in pipeline error rate. This ensures smoother and more reliable data workflow execution, directly impacting the quality and timeliness of their data-driven decisions.
2. Faster failure recovery: Prefect's advanced error handling and retry mechanisms led to an 88% reduction in failure recovery time. This significant improvement minimizes downtime and enhances overall system resilience, ensuring that Progressive's critical data operations remain consistently available.
3. Increased visibility and control: The single dashboard provided by Prefect offers a comprehensive view of data workflows. This enabled effective monitoring, bottleneck identification, and process optimization, giving Progressive's data platform team unprecedented control over their data operations.

Progressive's experience demonstrates that in today's data-driven world, the question isn't whether you can afford advanced orchestration—it's whether you can afford to operate without it. When a robust orchestration platform can lead to such dramatic improvements in reliability, efficiency, and control, the ROI becomes crystal clear.

In the world of data platforms, orchestration isn't just a component—it's the baseline on top of which all insights and data-driven business processes are built.

The Bottom Line

Every company is now a data processing company, whether they realize it or not.

A reliable data platform isn't just nice to have—it's a business imperative. And at the heart of every great data platform is robust orchestration. It's not just about scheduling jobs; it's about ensuring resilience.

So, take a hard look at your current data infrastructure. Is it a well-oiled machine, or is it held together with duct tape and hope? If it's the latter, it might be time to consider investing in advanced orchestration. The value of a resilient platform is particularly appreciated when we are starving at 8:30pm waiting for our pizza delivery.

Let us show you how Prefect does this for top enterprises - book a demo here.