A modern data platform is table stakes for most businesses. Here’s how to leverage the technology to get the most from your investment.
Most organizations have made, or are about to make, serious investments in modern data platform technology. These are table stakes — the price to be competitive and in the game.
They must pose the question, “Now what?”
However, for forward-thinking CIOs and IT leaders, the challenge is what comes next — how do they leverage the investment they’ve made to drive business success? How do they transform infrastructure into actionable insight, governance into growth, and data into enterprise value?
At NRI, we have the proven experience and expertise to operationalize, monetize, and optimize modern data platforms with strategic intent. Read on to discover how we can help you scale your investment and democratize access so you operate with confidence and achieve a measurable ROI. We can ensure that your data platform becomes a strategic engine for innovation and impact.
You can lay a foundation today that enables you to conquer future business and operational challenges.
What is the Modern Data Platform?
Simply put, a modern data platform is a comprehensive suite of tools, services, and applications that enable businesses to manage their data effectively. Its four-tier architecture includes infrastructure, data management, processing, and insights.
A modern platform usually provides considerable advantages over a legacy system that is:
- Unsupported
- Non-compliant
- A security risk
- Costly to maintain and repair
- Difficult to integrate
- Hard to scale
By contrast, a modern platform is flexible, cost-effective, fully scalable, and boasts powerful AI-enabled security protections and real-time analytics. It may contain powerful features, such as data lakehouse design, which combines the best aspects of a data warehouse and a data lake into a single solution, storing a broad range of data types and providing tools to support advanced analytics. It can also offer unified metadata, providing a comprehensive view of a company’s information by consolidating data sources.
NRI holds a leadership position in transforming data into actionable insights and leveraging AI as a tool to support informed decisions. We ensure the smart integration of AI technology into data platforms, helping to streamline operations, enhance customer experiences, and unlock new opportunities.
High-Impact Use Cases: From Platform to Power
When leveraging a new data platform, companies must aim for strategic outcomes that provide immediate benefits. For example, they can use predictive AI to identify patterns, understand causation, anticipate behaviors, forecast upcoming events, and do risk management.
NRI collaborated with a Midwest community college to help reverse declining enrollment by leveraging their existing student data into actionable insights. We implemented a solution involving Microsoft Power BI and Azure Synapse, enabling the college to communicate with students regularly in a consistent and meaningful way as part of a push to increase involvement. NRI data analytics accelerators can help reduce customer churn, offer advanced fraud detection, and provide large language models (LLMs), which are trained on massive datasets to perform advanced natural language and other content tasks.
With real-time data analytics, hospitals can optimize operational processes, enhance patient care, and inform strategic decision-making. Constantly updated dashboards provide visual overviews of key operational metrics, enabling better resource management, improved patient flow, and faster response times.
Organizations are also leveraging hybrid, multicloud systems that help achieve faster data recovery, greater flexibility, improved compliance, and optimized workloads. NRI collaborates with city governments, for example, to meet the growing demands for secure and efficient services while adapting to rapid urban development. We can merge cloud and on-premises IT services to enable urban governments to deliver enhanced services, meet the demands for accessibility and sustainability, and improve operational efficiency.
Scaling with Governance, Trust, and Cost Efficiency
In heavily regulated environments, such as healthcare, gaming, finance, supply chain, and others, NRI collaborates with clients to establish both agility and trust at an enterprise scale, employing a comprehensive approach to governance and infrastructure optimization.
We work closely with organizations to embed governance policies early in data pipelines, as well as automate data classification, lineage tracking, and access control before insights reach users.
As companies face global cyber threats, they can depend on NRI to provide effective protection with a “cyber-first mentality,” offering both security services and security products — unifying strategy and execution. We enable secure data sharing across multicloud and hybrid architectures. We also leverage role-based access, dynamic masking, and suit readiness for regulated industries.
As part of our multicloud strategy expertise (including OCI, Azure, and AWS), we can offer enterprises the ability to scale elastically, optimizing workloads through intelligent tiering and demand-based compute provisioning.
Organizational Enablement: Culture, Teams, and Change
As much as technology is essential for organizations to stay safe, protected, and operating at peak efficiency, the people and processes they have in place are equally, if not more, important.
We help clients launch executive-aligned centers of excellence (CoEs) that strike a balance between innovation and governance — embedding data, AI, and analytics across business units. To raise data literacy and align IT and business priorities, we guide leadership teams through training and workshops tailored to their specific needs.
With NRI’s support, companies can make the transition to agile squads that are fully able to deliver trusted, reusable, and business-aligned data assets.
Proving ROI: Metrics That Matter
Not only must companies strive to implement modern data platforms that perform effectively, but they must also use metrics to measure outcomes and guide strategic performance. NRI helps align data-platform KPIs with business goals, gauging success across areas that include:
- Decision velocity
- Operational efficiency
- Compliance scores
- Innovation metrics
As a case in point, we collaborated with a healthcare client to develop a unified data platform that reduced diagnostic reporting time by 40%. We helped Frederick Health to enhance patient experience, secure infrastructure, and drive operational efficiency.
As far as logistics, we have a proven track record of working with organizations to enable data streaming, which can improve service level agreement (SLA) adherence by 25%. Leveraging our Databricks partner capabilities, we can empower data-driven organizations with a single, collaborative platform for data engineering, analytics, and machine learning.
Roadmap: Innovation and What Comes Next
Do you need a data transformation partner who can help you modernize your operations now and work with you to evolve your IT infrastructure as conditions shift?
This is where NRI excels, providing future-ready solutions that support the integration of agentic AI, generative analytics, and automated ML pipelines, along with frameworks for safe experimentation and rapid scaling. Our partnerships with Microsoft, Oracle, Databricks, and AWS can help you to adopt leading AI and data tech while maintaining secure, compliant operations.
Are you ready to take the step beyond infrastructure to focus on what really matters: business outcomes? Our optimized methodology can help mitigate the risk associated with innovation while accelerating its maturity.
Contact us to schedule an NRI strategy session or CoE workshop. Your data transformation can begin now.
