The second phase of the transformation, which is currently underway, is to transform the organization’s data in the cloud by migrating the on-prem data lake to the AWS cloud, using AWS serverless architecture to build cloud-native data infrastructure. This would enable the organization to accelerate data insights, further standardize the technology stack, reduce technical debt, and take greater advantage of cloud-based services like machine learning.
New ways of working
The team also saw an opportunity to rethink the data operating model and avoid the potential bottleneck created by onboarding and syncing data in the centralized data lake. A new federated approach, which Accenture is helping to design and implement, will involve creating decentralized “data product” teams.
Oriented around individual data products, these teams will include business users, DevOps engineers, security experts and data analysts. The objective is that each data product team will take responsibility for aggregating, validating, enriching, and submitting its own data to the data lake and drawing insights out of it.
To make this flexible and user-centered approach work in practice, the organization will need self-service capabilities plus rigorous data governance and standardization.
Accenture is enabling this by building a standardized interface layer to enforce governance and providing a team of “Data-Infrastructure-as-a-Platform” engineers. This team will offer domain-agnostic self-serve tooling and infrastructure, ensuring product teams can pick and choose any cloud platform for their needs, enabling a hybrid multi-cloud environment.
