Factors that Drive the Build vs Buy Decision for Data Pipelines
Resource & Time Investment
To survive the cut-throat competition, organizations need to innovate & deliver value like never before. Hence, having only a skilled team of Data & Product engineers is not enough. These teams must also get the right amount of bandwidth & space to produce impeccable products.
In-house Data Pipelines have their share of positives. But, one of the most significant shortcomings they pose is the immense commitment they require. To set up an effective DIY solution, teams need to commit an exceptional amount of time, effort, and energy. Interestingly, most Data Engineers spend nearly 80% of their time managing these connectors. This requires them to go through tedious development & maintenance cycles. Well, it doesn’t stop there. Engineers also need to keep a tab on every update associated with a data source. This exceptionally tasking cycle lasts a few months at least. Hence, it prevents these star engineers from utilizing their immense potential. Instead of working on core projects, they end up spending their time maintaining integrations.
Purchasing & incorporating an automated Data Pipeline can be your one-stop solution here. It can help curtail the time, resources & effort you’re investing exceptionally. Automated Data Pipeline solutions can help reduce the development time to a few minutes, bringing it down from 3–4 months. This is in complete contrast to a DIY solution. These allow teams to set up a diverse set of Data Pipelines in a split second! You can unify, enrich & analyze your data in a matter of minutes. All this, without even having to spend a mere fraction of bandwidth and breaking a sweat! With such tools in place, you can invest your engineering expertise to build impeccable products. You can carry out an insightful analysis and set up strategies that take your business to new heights of profitability.
Scalability
In today’s immensely data-driven world, the need to add complex data sources as your business scales is inevitable for all organizations.
Building an in-house Data Pipeline requires you to have an immense engineering bandwidth. It’ll need you to match the dynamic connector requirements of Marketing, Sales, etc. teams as they jump from one source to another. Coding these many connectors for cross-functional data sources is no small feat. Hence, your DIY solution can quickly escalate into a major headache as it falls apart while failing to match your booming growth.
Purchasing a robust No-code Data Pipeline can be the solution to your scalability needs. Here, all you need to do is select a connector and unify your data in real time. It’s as simple as it sounds! You can even add more data sources as you grow! These automated solutions further provide you with the ability to ask for a new connector in case it’s not available. An automated solution will take away the headache of dealing with outdated APIs, a broken pipeline, etc. It will allow you to invest your bandwidth in carrying out an insightful analysis of your data.
Cost
Irrespective of whether you Build or Buy a Data Pipeline, you’ll have to invest. But, using an automated solution can curtail your expenses. It can help reduce them to approximately 1/10 of the traditional approach. Building a Data Pipeline from the ground up puts forward a direct cost of hardware. It requires setting up an in-house infrastructure backed by an exceptional engineering team. A DIY solution can further raise an immense operational cost of maintenance & debugging. It’ll need you to keep a tab on failures, inconsistent data ingestions, schema changes, etc.
Purchasing a fully-managed & automated Data Pipeline allows you to ETL data with ease! Here, everything is taken care of by the Data Pipeline provider for you! You need not spend even a penny/effort on building & maintaining the infrastructure. You can subscribe to transparent subscription-based pricing & ensure that you only pay for what you use. Hence, it’ll help you slash your six-figure ownership cost to a mere fraction of the same! That too, with better features and functionalities!
Security
Ensuring a secure & robust data transfer is one of the most critical aspects of any solution. It helps organizations decide whether a solution is a right choice or not.
It’s a no-brainer that building a Data Pipeline from scratch provides you with a holistic view of your data & the operations running on it. It even lets you have granular-level control over your data. But, keeping your data secure & private is easier said than done. It requires you to put in place the right set of vigilance layers to keep your critical data protected at all times. Security regulations & compliances change dynamically. Hence, implementing them is, without a doubt, a challenging & tasking process.
Having a No-code Data Pipeline in place makes this process an absolute cakewalk. These tools support enterprise-grade security compliances such as SOC II, HIPAA & GDPR. Hence, they allow you to ETL your data in an exceptionally secure manner at all times. With these tools, you can ensure a safe data transfer without worrying about dynamic security regulations. All this without having to break a sweat!
Data Pipeline Performance & Monitoring
Managing large volumes of complex data is no trifling matter. Hence, having a robust and impeccably foolproof system is of paramount importance.
Setting up high-performing Data Pipelines requires organizations to ensure both engineering & DevOps bandwidth. It’s safe to say that having built the system from scratch, engineering teams would have in-depth knowledge of their product. It’ll even allow them to tweak & resolve errors/exceptions with ease. But this comes at a tradeoff! Building a DIY solution requires setting up high-performance monitoring and instrumentation systems. These systems are an absolute must to keep track of such errors. Setting up a dependable system; capable of meeting the requirements across all use cases & operation scales is a hard nut to crack.
Automated Data Pipelines impeccably tackle this issue. They house an exceptionally fault-tolerant and robust architecture. Hence, they can ensure a smooth performance across all use cases and deployment scales. No-code Data Pipelines such as Hevo thus; help manage data in real-time in a secure & consistent manner. Automated solutions support intuitive monitoring & alert systems that help track all issues. Users can leverage their impeccable documentation support & in-built systems to resolve all errors in a jiff. Built on the idea of providing the best-in-class experience, these further extend spectacular customer support. These star customer support teams help resolve any unhandled error effortlessly.
Reliability
Most organizations face the challenge of achieving timely availability of reliable & accurate data.
Building a reliable in-house solution requires having immense technical expertise in place. Here, to ensure data reliability, you’ll need to handle errors manually. These errors/exceptions can include schema changes, variations, etc. Tackling such non-trivial issues can often result in never-ending delays. These can even result in analysts using inconsistent data for analysis. Hence, these errors can affect the quality of the decision-making process.
In contrast to a DIY solution, No-code Data Pipelines is built with the idea of being able to handle all such exceptions with ease! These provide a remarkably efficient enterprise-grade solution to organizations. Hence, they can resolve all such errors/exceptions like schema changes, etc., automatically. Automated solutions, thus, support timely & real-time availability of up-to-date & error-free data. With an automated solution in place, businesses need not worry about data inconsistencies.
By considering the above factors, along with your unique business requirements, you’ll be able to conclude whether you want to Build or Buy a Data Pipeline solution.
Let me know your thoughts on Build Vs Buy the Data Pipeline in the comments.
Also, read — Need and Benefits of Automating Data Integration
