Data lakes are designed to hold, process and facilitate limited analysis on data. So why, you might ask, does a company need both a data lake and analytics platform for sustainability and energy data?

Companies are expanding their data management infrastructures both massively and quickly, which has led some companies to create their own data lake. A data lake is a centralized repository that brings in business performance data from a variety of sources to an internally hosted database in a structured and unstructured format.

A major challenge with data lakes on their own is that most are primarily databases. Data lakes may facilitate some data capture and data transformation capability, as well as some analysis and visualization capability, but they are generic tools without any built-in energy and sustainability domain knowledge. Therefore, putting data lakes and analytics together is essential to get the most value from your sustainability and energy business data.

Organizations could of course build that specialist functionality into their data lake. But this could take years, and still fall short of the rich data insights drawn through leading data management vendors. Using IBM Envizi for this task provides organizations rich sustainability and energy functionality at a fraction of the cost it could take to develop in-house.

Data lakes and analytics platforms such as IBM Envizi do not compete with each other but complement each other, directly adding and retrieving data from the data lake and deriving insights from the data to inform monitoring, analysis and reporting outputs.

Build your sustainability data foundation, streamline reporting and accelerate decarbonization with the IBM Envizi ESG Suite