In Depth

In Depth

Data warehousing

• Data lake storage: Cloud vs on-premise data lakes

  The data lake is a fundamental concept of data management. But what type of storage do you need to build a data lake on and what are the pros and cons of on-premise vs the cloud?  Continue Reading

• Five key points about unstructured data storage on-prem and cloud

  We look at unstructured data, the myriad forms of data it comprises and the key storage options available, which include NAS and object storage on-prem and in the cloud  Continue Reading

• APAC buyer’s guide to data management

  In this buyer’s guide, we look at the challenges surrounding why enterprises are struggling to deal with data, the use of cloud data management platforms, artificial intelligence, and recommend some best practices  Continue Reading

• Get ready for CCPA: Implications for UK businesses

  The California Consumer Privacy Act, a wide-ranging data privacy and consumer protection law, comes into effect on 1 January 2020. How does CCPA differ from the EU GDPR regulations and what are the responsibilities for UK businesses operating in the...  Continue Reading

• Oracle and The World Bee Project expand partnership following trials

  Trials of ‘smart hive’ technology have enabled The World Bee Project to collect billions of data points about the health and activity of honey bees, for scientific research and conservation efforts  Continue Reading

• Sainsbury’s Bank moves data to AWS cloud with Teradata UDA

  Bank decided on a fundamental shift to AWS cloud, using Teradata’s Unified Data Architecture, after it was divested from Lloyds in 2013. Here’s how it built from a new ground zero.  Continue Reading

• Silicon Valley startups look to plug gaps in data value chain

  A group of California-based startups and early-stage data management companies are promising CIOs ways to plug gaps in the data-to-insight value chain  Continue Reading

• How modern business intelligence shapes up to big data

  Business intelligence and analytics strategies have evolved in recent years in the face of big data. Here, we get a supplier CEO perspective, some analyst counsel, and testimony from Nationwide, Schroders and King  Continue Reading

• Southern Water’s centralised data team geared for silo busting

  Southern Water has centralised its data specialists and overhauled its data management and business intelligence technology to support business decision-making at scale  Continue Reading

• Silicon Valley startups home in on pressing value from data

  A slew of California-based startup and early-stage data analytics companies are promising CIOs better ways to get value from their investments in databases and analytics  Continue Reading

• MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor speaks about ‘expanding universe’ of BI

  Co-founder and CEO of MicroStrategy takes the long view on business intelligence and sees its universe expanding with mobile technologies  Continue Reading

• Understanding analytics and storage performance

  Analytics workloads place specific demands on storage. We take a look at the workload profiles of analytics use cases and the storage platforms available to support them  Continue Reading

• How SAS is prepping its marketers for the data flood

  A shift in culture and mindset is necessary for marketers to succeed in tapping marketing analytics to stay relevant to the needs of customers  Continue Reading

• Australia a hotbed for data analytics

  Market for technologies that help organisations make sense of vast volumes of data is hotting up Down Under  Continue Reading

• A Good American: Surveillance, 9/11 and the NSA

  Computer Weekly sat down to watch Friedrich Moser's documentary about the NSA whistleblower Bill Binney - A Good American  Continue Reading

• Master data management gains ground in UK public sector

  Local authorities and NHS organisations in England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland are making slow but sure progress with master data management technology to gain a single view of the citizen  Continue Reading

• Apache Spark grows in popularity as Hadoop-based data lakes fill up

  Apache Spark is growing in popularity and finding real-time use across Europe, including in online betting and on railways, and with Hadoop  Continue Reading

• Netherlands needs ‘bottom up’ approach to create smart cities

  Dutch municipalities see the need to make their cities smarter, but often lack the necessary knowledge and do not know where to begin  Continue Reading

• CW@50: Data management – Five decades of prospecting for business value

  Data management and business intelligence have been at the heart of business value creation for decades. Read about how Computer Weekly has tracked their promise and tribulations  Continue Reading

• Interview: James Bamford on surveillance, Snowden and technology companies

  Investigative journalist and documentary maker James Bamford was among the first to uncover the secrets of the US National Security Agency and its global surveillance  Continue Reading

• How Asean organisations are untangling big data storage challenge

  If organisations are to benefit from the promise of big data they must get on top of a legal and regulatory minefield when it comes to storing data. How are Asean IT departments navigating this?  Continue Reading

• Analytics helps Asean organisations read between the lines

  Asean organisations need to develop an enterprise-wide approach to analytics and draw on customer insight if they are to maximize the business value of data  Continue Reading

• Australian businesses running the numbers on analytics-driven customer service

  Australian businesses, such as the University of Adelaide, are gaining customer insights from large volumes of data through data analytics technology.  Continue Reading

• Spark versus MapReduce: which way for enterprise IT?

  The younger, nimbler Spark technology looks set to replace MapReduce in big data architectures. What is the pace, scope and scale of replacement?  Continue Reading

• Using SAP Hana as a data warehouse

  Enterprises are using SAP Hana for in-memory data marts and SAP Business Warehouse implementations that integrate with other data warehouses  Continue Reading

• Welsh Water billing replacement programme offers customers new tariffs

  Welsh Water (Dŵr Cymru) scooped a Computer Weekly award for a billing replacement programme for which it was its own systems integrator  Continue Reading

• British Gas Smart Metering consolidates data with Qlik on Hadoop

  British Gas Smart Metering has used QlikView dashboards on Hadoop data lake to gain single view of its business  Continue Reading

• CIO interview: CABI’s Andrea Powell on feeding the world

  CABI CIO Andrea Powell says the not-for-profit agri-science data provider aims to solve the world’s agricultural problems with data, structured and unstructured  Continue Reading

• Oracle cloud makes headway in eastern Europe

  Oracle’s cloud services have been making headway in eastern Europe, including at Romania’s Banca Transilvania  Continue Reading

• Business cases emerge from growing pains of Hadoop 1.0

  The hype around the early generation of Hadoop is giving way to the reality of business programmes based on Hadoop 2 and Apache Spark  Continue Reading

• Single inventory accuracy: the holy grail of retail

  The ability to accurately pinpoint where stock is at every point in the supply chain is one of the biggest challenges facing retailers today  Continue Reading

• Mobile apps bring benefits and problems for enterprises in Poland

  Mobile business applications are gaining importance in Poland as broadband coverage expands and smartphone and tablet use increases  Continue Reading

• How the BBC became digital in three-and-a-half years

  The BBC has undergone a digital transformation that started 18 months prior to the London 2012 Olympic Games  Continue Reading

• Polish banking, energy and public services weigh up benefits of big data applications

  For many Polish institutions big data is still only in the planning stage, but banks and the energy and public sectors are beginning to use the technology  Continue Reading

• Sweden’s Klarna and Spotify design big data architectures to aid business growth

  Many organisations still don't know how to capitalise on big data. Swedish firms Klarna and Spotify are making use of its possibilities  Continue Reading

• In-memory database technology puts Mitie and Wooga in the fast lane

  Mitie uses IBM Cognos running on a DB2 Blu in-memory database taking data from Oracle. And gaming firm Wooga is using Exasol to speed up design  Continue Reading

• Big data storage: Analytics takes small first steps in Turkey

  Etiya’s Somemto social media management project makes pioneering steps in big data with a Hadoop cluster on an Oracle Big Data Appliance.  Continue Reading

• Unilever puts SAP at the captain’s table

  Consumer goods company Unilever works hand in glove with SAP in “speeding up its growth”, according to senior executives at the two firms  Continue Reading

• Standard Life blazes savings trail with Oracle Fusion

  Standard Life has generated £8m in cash savings on a £12m investment in Oracle Fusion applications but wider market take-up has been slow, says Forrester  Continue Reading

• IFS ERP investment underlies port firm’s growth

  PD Ports has seen its traditional markets in chemicals and heavy industry dwindling. It aims to diversify, supporting retail sector and renewable energy. It chose IFS for its new ERP  Continue Reading

• Cloudera v Hortonworks: Hadoop to complement or replace data warehouse?

  As the market for enterprise Hadoop heats up, the battle lines between two suppliers - Cloudera and Hortonworks - become more clearly defined  Continue Reading

• Write-through, write-around, write-back: cache explained

  Cache is vital for application deployment, but which one to choose – write-through, write-around or write-back cache? We examine the options  Continue Reading

• Accenture’s UK analytics head sees clients reorganising for digital

  Ray Eitel-Porter is managing director of analytics for Accenture UK & Ireland. He talks to Computer Weekly about how data management has assumed a more elevated strategic role as companies go digital  Continue Reading

• Cloudera CTO: enterprise ‘data hub’ is smartphone to data warehouse SLR

  Amr Awadallah is the chief technology officer and a co-founder at Hadoop distributor Cloudera. Here he briefs Computer Weekly on how the supplier is advocating the concept of an ‘enterprise data hub’  Continue Reading

• SAP execs predict more innovation as economic outlook improves in 2014

  SAP executives are looking to 2014 as a year to establish the supplier’s innovation agenda of in-memory database technology, cloud and mobile  Continue Reading

• Top 10 information management stories of 2013

  Top 10 information management stories of 2013. Putting analytics to work emerged as the most popular theme, with Tesco, McLaren, and Telefonica Ireland among those leading the data analytics pack  Continue Reading

• Procter & Gamble uses Teradata cloud analytics for global marketing

  Procter & Gamble has 15,000 websites, but sells almost exclusively through retailers. This makes gathering intelligence on customers tough  Continue Reading

• Skillpages develops DataStax Cassandra to rank trades with NoSQL

  How do you find a good tree surgeon you can trust because he or she has been recommended by someone in your social circle?  Continue Reading

• Big data journalism exposes offshore tax dodgers

  How journalists harnessed big data to challenge offshore financial secrecy  Continue Reading

• Big data storage choices

  Big data storage demands capacity and processing/IOPS performance and a range of choices exist such as scale-out NAS, object storage, hyperscale and hyper-converged storage  Continue Reading

• Good data management cuts costs and boosts compliance

  Organisations can gain value from data by learning how to create information – and subsequently knowledge – from it.  Continue Reading

• Getting the measure of collecting data for a future of personalised service

  Businesses that know about their customers have always been able to use that data to offer a bespoke service - big data brings new opportunities  Continue Reading

• Three approaches to HANA adoption: business need, process, full ERP

  Accenture consultants identify three ways to adopt HANA: tactical, addressing a single business process, full-scale ERP transformation  Continue Reading

• CW500: Why Channel 4 is crunching big data

  Bob Harris, Channel 4's chief technology officer, charts the broadcaster's technology strategy to use big data to form closer links with viewers  Continue Reading

• European banks raise data management game in response to new regulations

  European banks need to improve their handling of data if they are to recover from the financial crisis and comply with demanding legislation  Continue Reading

• What does a petabyte look like?

  How can you visualise a petabyte of data? What is it in real terms? Some experts try to make real the colossal size of the mighty petabyte  Continue Reading

• Online gambling sector bets on business intelligence

  Online gambling and gaming industries crave structured business data. Volumes can be huge and they need to react to customer behaviour  Continue Reading

• Big data and master data management more coupled than expected

  Master data management provides the dimensions for big data facts, as a slew of big data projects highlight a link to data governance and quality  Continue Reading

• Unilever enterprise data warehouse locked to business programmes

  Unilever is building a global enterprise data warehouse (EDW) locked into the critical paths of high-profile business programmes.  Continue Reading

• Aster Data founders explain unified approach to data, big and small

  Aster Data’s founders explain their approach to handling relational data and, within the same engine, multiple forms of non-relational data: the principle of closure  Continue Reading

• Departmental BI dashboarding needs enterprise view

  Align departmental business intelligence dashboards with enterprise business intelligence (BI) and corporate strategy to avoid data silos.  Continue Reading

• Irish dairy exporter plots expansion with data matching

  Irish Dairy Board aims to match consumer preferences with the dairy produce of farmers and processors. Aligning data from multiple sources is critical if data matching is to sub-serve export growth  Continue Reading

• Teradata CTO: 'Big data' technology starting to hit the mainstream

  Teradata’s chief technology officer Stephen Brobst reflects on the “big data” landscape, in-memory as hype, cloud data warehousing and mobile consumer intelligence.  Continue Reading

• Data virtualisation on rise as ETL alternative for data integration

  The Phone House and Novartis have turned to data virtualisation from Denodo and Composite to gain a single logical view of disparate data sources.  Continue Reading

• 'Big data' MDM processes key to finding business value in new info

  Big data MDM projects encounter a green field in the form of social media. And all big data is enterprise data, by definition. Business leaders will look to IT to derive serious business value.  Continue Reading

• Making money from data: Financial business intelligence at work

  Finance professionals are heavy users of BI and predictive analytics software. Find out how a variety of European finance functionaries are analysing trends, cutting costs and finding new business.  Continue Reading

• 'Big data' applications bring new database choices, challenges

  The dormitory world of databases has been roused from slumber by “big data” and associated technologies: MapReduce, Hadoop, MPP, NoSQL. Andy Hayler details big data’s impact and the issues it raises.  Continue Reading

• Roundtable: Modern data integration best practices to be more agile

  Our roundtable of experts considers the question of how modern organisations should best think about and approach agile data integration programmes.  Continue Reading

• Real-time data gains ground for risk management in beleaguered banking

  Risk management tops the agenda as European financial markets are rocked by debts and default risk. But is real-time data management part of the answer, or just a technology looking for a problem?  Continue Reading

• An eye on Indian enterprise data warehousing tools market

  Single vendor sourcing and emergence of appliances are leading to consolidation in the enterprise data warehousing tools market. Find key trends in DW tools.  Continue Reading

• Hadoop for big data puts architects on journey of discovery

  Solving the problems posed by big data has led architects beyond traditional database and business intelligence technologies to open source Hadoop.  Continue Reading

• Oracle: Embedded BI detects, analyses and acts

  Oracle’s senior director for business development, BI in the UK Nick Whitehead argues that the company’s BI Foundation Suite delivers the capability to act on insight.  Continue Reading

• Travel company bucks odds, touts success of data governance programme

  Three-quarters of data governance programmes don’t achieve much success, based on survey results. The Travel Corporation bucked the trend with a three-step programme that goes beyond IT.  Continue Reading

• IT in Europe e-zine: Data Management & BI Edition

  The benefits of effective data management and business intelligence are many; so are the challenges. Get practical information and advice on data management & BI strategies in the IT in Europe ezine.  Continue Reading

• DBAs and data warehouse architects in high demand

  Demand for senior DBAs and data warehouse architects has risen sharply. How can UK organisations find needed database skills, and how should skills availability influence database purchasing plans?  Continue Reading