help_outline CLOUD SPECIAL COVERAGE: THECUBE ON CLOUD by Mark Albertson SHARE There are times when a centralized data source may not always be a good idea. In a paper published in May 2019, Zhamak Dehghani (pictured), director of Next Tech Incubation NA at ThoughtWorks Inc., uncovered the trouble with data lakes. Despite hefty investments by major enterprises, such centralized reservoirs have created failure modes in deriving business value. Instead, Dehghani called for a paradigm shift that would draw on basic tenets of modern distributed architecture. For her, the time has come to start treating data as a product. “Let’s decouple this world of analytical data to mirror the same way we have decoupled our systems and teams and business,” Dehghani said. “Why should data be any different? Let’s bring product thinking and treating data as a product to the data that teams now share.”