Volkswagen Financial Services AG
Data Mesh Solution Using AWS Lake Formation
Discover how Adastra helped Volkswagen Financial Services to use Data Mesh and achieve an efficient, modernized and faster architecture.
Data mesh stands out as a decentralized approach to sharing, accessing, and managing analytical data in complex and large-scale environments within organizations. It is a new data architecture that allows companies to decentralize their data, facilitating the acquisition of business insights.
Competition in various sectors has never been so intense, nowadays enterprises’ level of adaptation and transformation ability form significant challenges and even higher barriers to overcome. Thus, it is important for enterprises to clearly understand the data mesh concept, its principles, and its benefits to gain a competitive edge.
Data mesh has become increasingly popular in recent years within data-driven companies. Traditional centralized data platforms widely known as data warehouses and data lakes come with inevitable weaknesses since centralized data becomes so enormous in size during a company’s lifecycle, acquiring accurate insights for business development starts to pose a challenge. Centralized data platforms may fail to cope with the rapidly changing demands of data-driven companies, unable to provide consistent, fast-paced, accurate, and high-quality data and hence the concept of decentralized data and data mesh came into the picture.
Values Underpinning a Data Mesh Culture
The data mesh concept unveiled a new paradigm in modern data management where data is treated as a product along with domain ownership, self-serving data infrastructure, and federated governance principles. Data mesh architecture eliminates the challenges confronted in traditional centralized analytical data platforms; the inability to deliver flexible and accurate insights that a company needs during a specific period. Data mesh architecture is the missing link and a solution to data lakes and data warehouse weaknesses. Realizing the data warehouse and data lake’s weaknesses, companies are in search of the best data mesh implementation and cloud strategy. Data-driven companies naturally and heavily depend on business insights derived from effective data management where data is used to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors. Consequently, effective data mesh implementation, digital transformation, and cloud migration have become indispensable factors for business success.
Pitfalls for Data Mesh
While it offers several benefits, it's important to also consider the potential challenges associated with implementing a Data Mesh architecture.
1. Complexity of Implementation
One of the major disadvantages of a Data Mesh architecture is its complexity of implementation. Creating a data mesh requires significant changes to an organization's existing data infrastructure, processes, and culture. This can be a daunting and time-consuming task, often requiring substantial investments in terms of resources, time, and money.
2. High Initial Overhead
Transitioning to a Data Mesh requires building and maintaining several new components such as domain-oriented data products, data platform services, and data infrastructure. The initial overhead of setting up these components can be high and might not provide immediate returns, especially for organizations with limited resources.
3. Organizational Resistence
Introducing a Data Mesh often involves a significant shift in how data is managed and governed across an organization. This can lead to resistance from existing teams and stakeholders who are accustomed to the traditional centralized data management approach. The change management process can be challenging and may face pushback from individuals who are uncomfortable with the new distributed model.
4. Data Consistency and Quality
In a Data Mesh, data ownership is decentralized to individual domain teams. While this encourages autonomy and faster development, it can also lead to issues related to data consistency, quality, and governance. Ensuring that data is accurate, reliable, and compliant with regulations becomes more complex when ownership is distributed.
5. Interoperability Challenges
A key goal of a Data Mesh is to enable domain teams to independently develop and deploy their own data products. However, this can lead to interoperability challenges when different data products need to communicate or exchange data. Ensuring seamless integration between these products can be challenging and may require additional engineering efforts.
6. Increased Maintenance Overhead
The distributed nature of a Data Mesh architecture means that there are multiple data products, pipelines, and services to maintain. This can lead to increased maintenance overheads as each domain team is responsible for its own data products. Ensuring consistent updates, bug fixes, and performance optimizations across the mesh can become a complex task.
7. Skillset and Talent Gap
Adopting a Data Mesh often requires a shift in the skillset and mindset of the organization. Data engineers, data scientists, and other professionals need to adapt to the new architecture and its associated tools and technologies. Organizations may face challenges in recruiting and retaining talent with the necessary expertise in the distributed data ecosystem.
8. Resource Intensive
While the Data Mesh approach aims to improve data accessibility, it can also lead to resource-intensive workloads. Each domain team needs to manage its own data infrastructure, which can result in redundant efforts and inefficient resource allocation, especially for smaller teams with limited resources.
9. Initial Performance Bottlenecks
During the transition to a Data Mesh, there might be initial performance bottlenecks as teams establish their data products and pipelines. These bottlenecks could arise from suboptimal data modeling, inefficient data-sharing mechanisms, or other unforeseen issues that emerge during the architectural shift.
10. Lack of Mature Tools and Practices
As of now, the Data Mesh architecture is a relatively new concept and lacks a mature ecosystem of tools, practices, and best practices compared to traditional centralized data architectures. This can pose challenges when organizations try to find suitable tools for various aspects of the Data Mesh implementation.
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Adastra brings to bear over 20+ years of experience in designing and deploying Information Governance strategies and frameworks. Gartner has recognized Adastra’s data governance capabilities, as we’ve proven our abilities to establish a vision for our client’s data that supports their business strategy and objectives.
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