With large players investing or entering the market such as Dow Jones & Company, comScore, Experian, Acxiom Corporation, Verizon Communications, and EMC Corporation it seems as if 2020 could be the year that DaaS as a concept becomes more widely adopted.
But was ist DaaS?
According to Econsultancy’s Digital Transformation and the Role of Data report:
“Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) is a data framework that essentially splits data access and usage from where the data is stored, freeing the data for multiple uses with speed and ease of access and the ability to scale usage. DaaS data agility is a substructure of digital transformation acting as a reinforcement to solutions enabled through digital transformation. DaaS data can permeate all corners of businesses and how they run with the aim to amplify capabilities and sustainably scale.”
Of course this is not entirely new. The concept could be traced back in some ways to Jeff Bezos 2002 mandate about every team in Amazon needing to expose their data and functionality via service interfaces.
These data flows created critical paths for teams to communicate and access other capabilities. But it also created the concept of open data at scale (DaaS) and created a service-oriented architecture in the business, effectively establishing separated parts of the company as individual platforms. Being open to external access also encouraged competition and collaboration, helping them to stay efficient and competitive.
With data now so critical to organisational capability Data-as-a-Service makes complete sense.