Smart Data Hubs: Replacing & Relegating Legacy Cores and enabling scale towards digital transformation

The industry is transforming from traditional bricks-and-mortar institutions into digital businesses. Organisations are moving away from legacy systems and embracing smart data hubs that provide the agility needed to compete in today’s fast-paced market. The business landscape is changing.

The issue of legacy systems is a real one. The rise of IoT devices and sensors has resulted in an explosion of data that cannot be processed by traditional systems or databases alone. This leads to poor performance and scalability issues which present significant barriers for companies looking to leverage their data assets as part of their digital strategy.

Legacy systems are the biggest hurdle to becoming data driven

Legacy systems are a bit like the old phone system in your home or office: they are complex webs of 10s or 100s of millions of lines of code, which were written decades ago by people who have retired or moved on to other jobs. Like your landline phone, these core systems are getting harder to maintain as they age and become less reliable. They also tend to be expensive to maintain because they require specialized knowledge and ongoing maintenance costs. Plus, they are often built on outdated technology (that makes it difficult for developers who want to make changes that would make them more efficient, secure, and scalable.

What are the challenges with legacy systems?

While legacy systems may have been a good fit for your business in the past, they often fail to meet the needs of today’s digital transformation. Legacy systems are expensive to maintain and difficult to update or change. This makes them unsuited for modern data requirements, which are becoming increasingly complex and diverse as businesses look to gain a competitive edge through data-driven decision making. Legacy core platforms can also be difficult to scale and grow with your business as it grows in size and scope a problem that smart data hubs address head-on by providing a robust foundation upon which you can build an intelligent ecosystem of connected applications.

Smart Hubs in Action

Most financial institutions provide a variety of services, ranging from core banking to credit cards, mortgages, and wealth management. The data for each of these services, however, is typically stored in multiple, siloed systems, such as operational datastores, data lakes, data warehouses, and SaaS applications. As a result, creating a real-time 360-degree view of a customer has become extremely difficult and often prohibitively expensive for businesses. The Smart Data Hub aggregates each customer’s current and historical information to create a unified, all-encompassing view of the customer. This view can then be used to present upsell and cross-sell opportunities across the company’s entire product line, and these opportunities can be presented to the customer through any touchpoint: a mobile app, a website etc.

A Smart Data Hub can also benefit retailers. A retailer that wants to fine-tune their online recommendation engine to deliver the most relevant recommendations as quickly as possible must have access to data from multiple sources, including the customer’s account information, current reward programme offerings that may apply to the customer, the customer’s past purchases (and returns), the past behaviour of similar customers, current product inventories, pricing, and shipping information.

Move towards Smart Data Hubs

Smart Data Hubs are not databases. They are, rather, tools for determining the relationship between data from various sources, managing consistent enterprise data, and consolidating (and eventually canonicalizing) the data most used within your organisation. They make managing provenance and governance much easier, and they can go a long way toward creating a centralised data system that can still be used by applications throughout your organisation.