What this blog covers:
- What a cloud semantic layer is and what it does.
- Explore the key benefits of cloud semantic layer, like simplifying analytics, facilitating self-service analytics, enabling unified data modeling, and enhancing performance.
- Also, know how this layer can streamline enterprise-wide collaborations for better decision-making.
Businesses often spend a lot of valuable time and money trying to make sense of their data. They invest in BI tools to help them understand what the data means, how it is used, and how it fits into their workflow and processes. But they don’t always have the time or resources to answer these questions.
Kyvos’ Smart Semantic LayerTM promises to solve this problem by providing meaning for your data in a way that can work with all use cases. And it does all that without slowing down your business operations.
What Does a Cloud Semantic Layer Do?
To understand what a cloud semantic layer can do, it’s helpful to understand what a semantic layer is in general. A semantic layer is a way of representing data that both humans and machines can understand. It’s a way of adding meaning to data for easy interpretation and usage.
A cloud semantic layer takes this one step further. It allows you to create a cloud-native ecosystem where your data can be abstracted so that the information is available to everyone who needs it as a single source of truth. It helps you make sense of and act upon the data that comes into your data lake in an endless stream.
While transparency and visibility are the obvious outcomes of this layer, it offers several benefits for your business if you follow semantic layer best practices. They include:
1. Simplicity at Your Fingertips
Let’s face it: business users aren’t necessarily technical experts who can fully comprehend and leverage their data assets with uniformity. Decoding technical metadata can be time-consuming, especially when sifting through trillions of rows with complex hierarchies or calculations. A study by Forrester says that 60%-73% of enterprise data isn’t used due to the lack of proper data analytics.
Data consumption becomes effortless with a universal semantic layer, though. It creates an easy-to-interpret and logical data model that abstracts business metrics and definitions under a single layer.
As a result, data users can focus more on business optimization without fretting over complex queries. Despite the complexities of data beneath the layer, they can simply drag and drop the measures or hierarchies in any report or chart.
2. Improved Data Control in the Self-Serve BI Ecosystem
Self-service BI tools have simplified data consumption to a great extent. They minimized reliance on IT by exposing business users to raw data fields. The process brings agility to analytics, but it also has its cons, such as:
- There’s a severe lack of consistency as each application can interpret the data models differently.
- Your teams will grapple with data analysis produced by others to make sense of it for creating their own calculations or reports.
- Disparate data silos make security and governance a challenge for the CIOs. And using multiple tools can create further chaos by generating different results for different users.
However, the semantic cloud layer can better control data pipelines by eliminating inconsistencies and creating smart analytics at suitable scales for better and quicker decision-making. No matter what questions you ask and in what format, you’ll get consistent answers.
A multi-tiered security architecture covering every row and column in a semantic layer provides granular access control for each query at the most granular level.
3. Unified Data Modeling
Within your organization, data may live in different systems across departments and geographical locations. The problem deepens with the higher influx of new data every day. It leads to data engineering teams spending more of their productive time on modeling data and building reports. That’s where a universal semantic layer comes to your rescue.
Regardless of the deployed BI tools or storage platforms, you can achieve a unified data model using this approach. And it works even better with the Kyvos visualization layer offering a consistent view across the enterprise.
A semantic layer in the cloud can define data relationships and complex calculations to represent your business logic. This physical data abstraction simplifies data access without even changing the interface you like.
4. Enhanced Performance
Since your data and analytics needs will grow with time, you need scalable solutions that can wrangle data at any level without affecting overall BI performance. With the Kyvos semantic layer in place, you will not only get a consistent data view but also experience exceptionally high performance on enterprise-wide analytics.
Even for future data workloads (growing by leaps and bounds), users will get instant answers to all their questions through our high-performing semantic layer powered by Smart OLAPâ„¢ technology. With minimal latency, any volume of data landing in your warehouses will be query-ready in a few minutes.
The model not only reduces the physical complexities of data for business users but also helps interpret it correctly to speed up your decision-making processes. Kyvos pre-aggregates data to optimize performance across many dimensions and measures without any data movement.
5. Streamlined Collaboration for Data-Driven Decisions
Despite having plentiful data in your repository, deriving coherence from it may seem a colossal task, especially for larger teams looking to access, share, or search that data from different perspectives.
However, the semantic layer simplifies the task by offering cross-functional visibility to teams and democratizing data access for all. This will help you integrate and unify all the data sets before presenting them to different business users with varied needs. You will experience higher productivity and profitability by leveraging collaborative intelligence-sharing.
A semantic layer in the cloud can play a pivotal role in your business intelligence strategy. It will help reduce costs, increase agility, and improve query performance while unifying analytics and streamlining collaboration. In short, it’s a game-changer for data-driven organizations.
So, give your business the operational edge it deserves with our Cloud Semantic Layer. Schedule a demo with our team today!
