New Survey Finds Two Thirds of Data Teams Report Cloud Spending as a Critical KPI

Unravel Data, the first data observability platform built to meet the needs of modern data teams, released key findings from a survey administered to more than 350 data professionals who attended the 2023 Data Teams Summit event in order to gauge the priorities, challenges, and benchmark the progress of enterprise data teams. This year’s survey asked data team stakeholders – including a cross-section of data scientists, data engineers, data analysts and the various business stakeholders who rely upon real-time data insights to inform their decisions – to assess how they are meeting their big data analytics objectives and define the practices they are adopting to conquer the complexities of the modern data stack.

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“For the third year in a row we’ve had the opportunity to take the pulse of enterprise data teams to better understand the daily challenges they face as they accelerate their ambitious big data analytics programs”

“For the third year in a row we’ve had the opportunity to take the pulse of enterprise data teams to better understand the daily challenges they face as they accelerate their ambitious big data analytics programs,” said Kunal Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Unravel Data. “In just the course of a year we’ve seen a significant shift in how these growing, cross-functional teams are prioritizing DataOps as an established discipline across their organizations in a similar way that DevOps became an entrenched practice among software teams a decade ago. But despite this progress, this year’s survey also demonstrates that issues like FinOps, cloud utilization, and data security continue to present unique challenges to data teams.”

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Some of the key findings collected from the most recent survey include:

• Cloud spending is now a critical KPI for the majority of data teams: More than two-thirds of data teams surveyed said that cloud spending has become a KPI of high strategic importance. When responses were broken down by role, almost 80% of business stakeholders said cloud spending was a critical KPI while just over half (55%) of data practitioners indicated the same.
• Cloud resources are being underutilized: In addition to cloud spending being elevated as a top KPI, almost half (44%) of all respondents in this year’s survey also reported that they believe that they are leaving money on the table when it comes to their public cloud utilization. Alarmingly, almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they were unable to even estimate what percentage of their cloud resources went unused.
• FinOps interest is high yet adoption lags: Despite the fact that data teams have reported a lack of visibility into cloud spending, the adoption of mature FinOps practice was not viewed as an immediate priority among respondents with just over 20% reporting that their data teams have an established FinOps practice while a third of data teams reported that they are still in the early planning phase of implementing FinOps.
• DataOps as a practice is maturing: This year, more than 44% of respondents reported they are actively employing DataOps methodologies, compared to just less than a quarter (21%) of respondents in 2022, representing a 110% increase from the year prior. Further demonstrating the maturing DataOps practice, only 20% of respondents in this year’s survey said they were at the beginning stage compared to 41% last year.
• Data reliability emerges as the top challenge: This year when participants were asked what they viewed as the top challenge with operating their data stack, 41% respondents cited the lack of data quality as their most significant obstacle while 35% noted that the lack of visibility across their environments was the second biggest obstacle to managing their data stack.

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