Blog

Discover a wealth of data innovation and expertise within the Oakland blog hub – equipping you with all the latest industry knowledge to help your business get the most from its data.

Post How To Create a Data Product-Focused Data Strategy

How To Create a Data Product-Focused Data Strategy

Data engineering and storage costs are rising rapidly, with a 30% increase in 2022 (US and European cloud prices set to soar in 2023 – Techzine Europe). As US and European cloud prices were set to soar in 2023, data leaders searched for ways to maintain delivery speed while improving data governance and managing budgets….

Post Thinking of doing Data Mesh? – Start with Data Products

Thinking of doing Data Mesh? – Start with Data Products

Data mesh has been the number one topic of conversation among the data crowd over the past few years. From the CDO Exchange to Big Data London, which even had a stage dedicated to the subject! The four principles of data mesh have been debated, dissected, and diagnosed at length via books, blogs, conferences, and…

Post Can you really build a cloud data platform in six weeks?

Can you really build a cloud data platform in six weeks?

In short: yes, but no, but yes…sort of…it depends. For a better answer, let’s start by describing what we mean by a cloud data platform, as it can mean a few different things. Generally, it refers to a series of different components and resources deployed in the cloud to ingest, store, process, and report upon…

Post A data strategy is not a ‘strategy for data’ 

A data strategy is not a ‘strategy for data’ 

Most data strategies fail to make it from reading material to change accelerant. This means that they don’t create tangible outcomes. Worse, they fail to address gaps in understanding and expectation. Simply, they don’t achieve relevance. When this happens, data and analytics remain an isolated technical domain focused on core activities’ ‘numerical exhaust.’  Why does…

Post How to manage spiralling cloud costs

How to manage spiralling cloud costs

“81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending by C-suite” VentureBeats, 2022 “Organisations with little or no cloud cost optimisation plans end up overspending on cloud services by up to 70% without deriving the expected value from it”  Gartner, 2022 Big Tech under pressure from cost-conscious cloud customers (ft.com) The cost of…

Post What are the challenges of building a data platform?

What are the challenges of building a data platform?

When building a data platform for your business, you need to anticipate and plan for any potential challenges you may encounter. That’s where a data engineering specialist can help.  With decades of data experience behind us, we’ve seen and dealt with practically every problem you might encounter during data platform development. In this guide, we’ll…

Post What are the benefits of working with a data governance consultancy?

What are the benefits of working with a data governance consultancy?

In this blog, Oakland’s Andrew Sharp talks to Terri Linnet Bickford, one of Oakland’s senior data governance consultants, about the advantages of working with an external provider. They talk about the benefits of having access to a team of experts, the value of a data governance maturity assessment, and the importance of culture in establishing…

Post Why do you need a data platform?

Why do you need a data platform?

If you’ve been exploring ways of optimising your data management and strategy, you’ve likely heard of or been recommended a data platform. But what is a data platform, and do you really need one for efficient data management?  In this guide, we’ll share the benefits and capabilities of a bespoke data platform so that you…

Post What is a data platform?

What is a data platform?

In today’s digitised business landscape, the ability to collect, analyse, and manage data effectively can be the critical difference between a business’s success and failure. But what exactly enables businesses to harness the full potential of their data? Enter the customer data platform. In this blog, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about data…

Post Does Microsoft Purview solve the Data Governance Challenge?

Does Microsoft Purview solve the Data Governance Challenge?

Microsoft Purview Data Governance for the cloud, on-premise, multi-cloud and office 365 workloads. Introduction Most organisations are exploding with data that has been collected, transformed, and reported on, but this data is often not well-tracked as the organisation becomes more data-driven, increasing two pain problems that have been growing for the last few decades: How…

Post How to solve the leakage problem

How to solve the leakage problem

You can’t have failed to escape the recent press surrounding the water industry and leakage (especially here in the UK. It is estimated that 3 billion litres escape through leakage every day in England and Wales (the equivalent of 1,180 Olympic-sized swimming pools). Tracking down three billion litres of lost water – BBC News In…

Post Taming your data assets with Databricks

Taming your data assets with Databricks

Safely, securely, and efficiently handling data at any scale is challenging. Here at Oakland, we’ve had years of experience helping complex organisations tame their vast data assets to draw meaningful insights from them. These years of experience and the fact we are passionately tech-agnostic enable us to recommend the right tool for the job. One…