Scaling Your Data Platform: Five Key Capabilities

Scaling data platforms effectively is a critical differentiator for private market investors and financial services firms as well as traditional and alternative asset managers. A scalable data platform empowers these organizations to handle increasing data volumes, integrate new data sources, meet evolving user demands, and support advanced analytical requirements.

But not all data platforms are built for easy or flexible growth. Carefully evaluating and selecting a platform that is aligned to your data strategy is critical for ensuring your firm can respond to the ever-changing demands on data management. This article explores five key capabilities to look for when selecting a data management solution.

Five Capabilities to Look for in Your Next Data Platform

While many institutions are eager to modernize data management, transitioning to a modern system presents its own set of challenges. With limited resources and expertise, firms need to make the right decision the first time. Here are five critical capabilities that your next data management platform needs to have in order to scale with your business successfully:

1. Developing a growth plan and comprehensive reference architecture

A fully scalable data management platform should have a comprehensive modernization plan. Scaling any data platform involves detailed strategic planning to accommodate future growth seamlessly. Without a plan, a platform may struggle to adapt to diverse investment opportunities, new data sources, or increased workloads, for example. This plan, or roadmap, outlines how the data platform will evolve to meet future demands. It starts with a reference data architecture that outlines technical, infrastructure and process challenges that are specific to the firm. A modern reference architecture can leverage cloud-based solutions that offer elasticity and scalability on demand, allowing asset managers to scale these resources as the firm grows. With appropriate scalability planning, firms can respond proactively to increased data volumes, reduce compute time on checks and calculations, and distribute data efficiently.

2. Ensuring seamless data availability and reliability

A modern data management platform should provide seamless access to data for users across the organization. Mastering data in a centralized repository creates a “single source of truth” that can be leveraged by all lines of business and shared with downstream systems. A modern platform will not have limited data availability or reliability, but rather will improve decision-making processes and facilitate collaboration among cross-functional teams. These platforms will avoid data silos, accelerate retrieval times, and maximize data availability with a common source of data discovery. Self-service also plays an important part in enabling users to run checks and make corrections easily during regular operations, without involving IT. Lastly, a modern data management platform should have a robust data governance framework that ensures high data quality and accuracy.

3. Adapting to changing needs with configurable data dictionary

As your business evolves, so do your data requirements. A flexible data dictionary can adapt to changing business more easily, such as configuring new asset classes on the fly, which is common on the buy side. A flexible data dictionary reduces the time necessary to model a new security, reference data, and other data so it can be deployed to a variety of other systems.

4. Streamlining data integration

A modern data management platform should be able to seamlessly integrate with various data sources, applications, and third-party systems, including upstream and downstream systems. Seamless data integration significantly reduces the risk of siloed data or limited data distribution. Efficient data integration means shorter cycles to add new sources or change the mapping, consistent data without discrepancies, rapid synchronization, real-time data authoring, and easy collating from disparate datasets. In other words, a well-integrated data platform ensures data flows smoothly across the organization to support informed reporting and analytics.

5. Empowering users with self-service tools

An effective and scalable data platform has the right tools to meet the demands of a growing user base. Modern data management systems offer built-in flexibility that allows users with varying degrees of technical expertise to work with these tools. This “low-code/no-code” approach gives firms the ability to easily create workflows using modules or applets that reduce the need for complex training and coding. Instead, teams can create and manage data and track data lineage with full transparency and consistency. Additionally, as the firm grows, users can take advantage of pre-built adapters to make fast and seamless integrations with an increasing number of data sources.

Taking a Proactive Approach

Recognizing and implementing a data platform that is ready to scale with your firm is critical to any asset manager’s long-term success. It is preferable to take a proactive approach in an increasingly data-centric environment, which means seeking out a data management platform specifically designed to enhance accuracy and reliability rather than waiting for the limitations of an older, less flexible data management to start compromising your firm’s overall efficiency or ability to scale. By carefully evaluating these five capabilities and taking decisive action to find a suitable solution, private markets investors, financial services firms, and all kinds of asset managers can successfully overcome the challenge of data scalability.

IVP remains committed to helping asset managers and other organizations navigate the complexities of master data management with practical solutions tailored to specific needs. The comprehensive IVP Master Data Management (MDM) suite includes fully integrated solutions for security and reference data, entity data management, enterprise-wide data cataloging, data governance, reporting and analytics, all of which empower firms to streamline operations, mitigate operational risks, and focus on driving sustainable growth.

Learn more about the IVP Master Data Management suite right now or contact us to set up a live or online demo.