The "modern data stack" promised to revolutionize how organizations handle their data, but for many data teams, it has become a source of frustration. The ability to integrate various cloud-based data solutions is powerful, but data teams now spend their days acquiring and connecting various tools, debugging integrations, and trying to predict costs across a maze of pricing models — and none of that time directly adds business value. What started as a path to data-driven insights has turned into an endless cycle of infrastructure management.
The Problems with Building Your Own Data Stack
Today's data teams face a familiar routine: they need to extract data from multiple sources, load it into a warehouse, and transform it for analysis. Then they need to extract insights from the data and either build reports for decision makers or get the data back in the hands of their coworkers for action. For each step, they evaluate and purchase different tools, then spend weeks getting them to all work together. Just when everything seems stable, a critical tool updates its API or changes its pricing, and the cycle begins again.
The data analytics and engineering communities have started to realize that this approach isn't sustainable. Instead of answering crucial business questions with data, teams spend their time maintaining the infrastructure that's supposed to make their jobs easier. There has to be a better way.
Enter the Managed Data Stack
This is where Civis’s managed data stack, the Civis Platform, comes into play. Instead of requiring teams to piece together their own solutions, the Civis Platform provides an integrated environment where all the essential tools work together seamlessly.
The benefits of this approach become clear in day-to-day operations. When a data analyst needs to build a business report, they don't need to jump between three different tools. They can browse the data catalog, explore the data, and launch their new report all in one place. When it's time to set up a new data pipeline, data professionals don't need to worry about tool integration—they can focus on the logic that matters to their business.
This unified approach also makes it easier to maintain good data practices. Teams can organize their data with clear separations between development and production environments. They can implement consistent security controls across all their data operations. And perhaps most importantly, they can spend their time focusing on their business instead of managing infrastructure.
There are numerous potential benefits of using a managed data stack rather than building your own.
Customizability
First and foremost, your data stack must meet the needs of your organization.
For example, if you’re a nonprofit organization, you may need a stack that makes it easy to plug into CRMs, understand donor behavior, and report on your programs. If you’re at a government organization, you may need a stack that enables interdepartmental collaboration while meeting standards for security and compliance.
Many organizations build their own data stacks by acquiring tools for the different components of a modern data stack: ingestion, storage, data transformation, orchestration, analysis, and reporting. By building their own, they might be able to benefit from extensive options for customizability. For example, an organization might rely heavily on a particular kind of chart for reporting, and if there’s a BI tool that makes that kind of chart a little better than other BI tools, the organization could put that BI tool in their stack. In some cases, such customizability can be worth it — but the total cost of ownership is often higher than people think.
There is a large space of products for the modern data stack. This report, for example, shows hundreds of tools just for data engineering tasks. Any particular tool may or may not work well with any other tool, regardless of what its documentation says. Selecting the right set of tools is nontrivial and has potentially large cost implications.
Civis has chosen the components of the Civis Platform managed data stack carefully in response to its customers needs, and a variety of organizations have found through day-to-day use over several years that those components work together reliably.
The flexibility of Civis’s managed data stack is evident in the range of industries its users work in. Civis has provided managed data stack solutions to nonprofits, state and local governments, federal government agencies, global health organizations and major commercial brands. Check out our customer stories for examples.
Also, if you need customization beyond what’s available in Civis Platform, Civis Professional Services may be able to help. In addition to offering services such as helping define a data roadmap or setting up a data warehouse, Civis’s Services team can build custom integrations to extend your managed data stack.
Integration
Your data stack must provide a highly usable, reliable experience for all of the different types of work that you need to do for your organization.
Sustaining a high-quality user experience across components is a major challenge for the modern data stack and is perhaps the strongest reason to go with a managed data stack. Without seamless integrations, data analysts and other users often end up needing to switch back and forth between multiple tools to get anything done. Users may get slowed down by needing to perform manual steps in order to connect data stack components that aren’t well-integrated. With Civis Platform, however, there’s a common interface across nearly all of the components so that you can ingest data, query it, check its quality, transform it, and create charts and reports from it in one place. And with the Scripts, API, and Workflows features of Civis Platform, you can automate every step.
If you build your own data stack, you may also end up assuming security risks or compliance burdens that you wouldn’t have with a managed data stack. Similar to how a build-your-own data stack can have a poor user experience if its components aren’t well-integrated, it may also have security and compliance issues — for example, when managing user access across multiple systems. A managed data stack, on the other hand, should follow best practices to give you peace of mind, such as how Civis Platform is SOC 2 compliant and FedRAMP Moderate Authorized.
A managed data stack can also accelerate complex tasks. Since the technologies in the stack are selected to work together, it’s possible to provide features that use multiple components to facilitate efficient work. For example, in Civis’s Query tool, you can ask Civis SQL AI Assist to help you query your data. Since it’s an integrated part of the managed data stack, SQL AI Assist will retrieve information about the structure of your data to provide a more accurate response than a separate AI tool could. And then, after running your query, you can also use Civis’s built-in reporting capabilities to create a chart to share securely with your team. You can go from idea to chart with a few clicks without changing tabs.
Availability
Your data stack has to be up and running, ready for you to do work. It has to be stable and reliable, and it has to keep your data secure.
If you build your own stack, then at some level you will support your own stack. Individual vendors provide technical support for their products, but they may only provide limited help when it comes to integrations with other products.
Supporting your own data stack will consume internal resources to address issues that come up related to infrastructure setup and integration code. You may not be able to track such a cost as clearly as a monthly payment or annual contract with a software vendor, but it’s there. What’s more, the need to fix infrastructure problems is most likely to pop up at the time your team is the most busy. For example, you might have a big project that needs your whole data team, and they might discover a scalability issue while pushing the limits of your stack to get the project done. A managed data stack provider like Civis could jump in and scale up your infrastructure for you, but if you’ve built your own stack, your data team might get pulled off the project to patch your data stack.
A key advantage of a managed data stack like Civis Platform is that it’s supported by Civis to ensure that it’s reliable. Creating a modern data stack from various components can be a big challenge, but keeping the components working well together 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is a much bigger challenge. If you have a few folks on your team build your data stack, then you may be in a tough spot if something breaks when they’re unavailable.
Costs
Your data stack should have predictable costs that can scale with your organization’s needs.
As mentioned above, a build-your-own solution may have substantial and unpredictable maintenance costs since team members may need to be pulled off of other projects to help maintain your stack. Acquiring components from multiple vendors can also introduce a substantial amount of uncertainty and complexity, especially since the vendors may have different ways of charging for usage or seats, different legal terms, etc. Working with a single vendor for a managed data stack can help avoid this complexity and save you money.
The Bottom Line
The promise of the modern data stack was to make working with data easier and more efficient, but many organizations were left struggling to integrate and maintain a disparate set of tools. The Civis Platform managed data stack delivers on the promise of the modern data stack by handling the complexity for you. By choosing Civis Platform, organizations can stop wrestling with tool integration and start focusing on what really matters: using their data to drive better decisions.
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