Data warehouses not delivering return on investment

A report from Dremio, based on a study by Wakefield Research, shows only 22 percent of data leaders have fully realized their return on data warehouse investment in the past two years, with most (56 percent) having no consistent way of measuring it.

Another startling finding is that in order to run analytics, enterprises are making multiple copies of their data -- 12 on average -- with 60 percent reporting that their company has over 10 copies of their data floating around.

What's more 82 percent say that their end users have used inconsistent versions of the same dataset at the same time due to their extract transform and load (ETL) processes, undermining data integrity and trust, and slowing down the decision-making process.

"Data leaders are frequently concerned about the out-of-control costs of data warehouses, particularly as their workloads grow – a big surprise to them since the data warehouse cost of entry can be low to start. Moreover, the lack of predictability around future costs leads to very poor financial governance for data leaders and CFOs alike," says Billy Bosworth, CEO of Dremio. "While companies understand they have an expensive sunk cost for data warehouses, they are keen on ways to drive newer analytics architectures directly from open data lakes for better financial governance and highly performant queries against vast amounts of data."

Among all data leaders who use a data warehouse, 94 percent report concerns over it. 79 percent are worried about scaling their architecture, with only 20 percent reporting having no concerns about the cost of scaling.

In addition 84 percent say it's normal for their data analysts to work with a partial data set. Just 16 percent expect fresh data in minutes or hours, while 51 percent expect it in terms of weeks. 76 percent say they are locked into certain vendors due to their closed systems.

The report introduces a Data Value Scorecard, a measure of companies' efforts to unlock the value or ROI of data. Through a series of metrics that assesses their data policies, the scorecard provides a quick, aggregated view of how efficiently companies and their employees use and manage data.

You can find out more about the scorecard and the research on the Dremio site.

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