Category: Tech Talk

Microsoft Ignite 2025: The Debrief from Oakland’s LinkedIn Live

If you missed our very first LinkedIn Live, don’t worry – we’ve pulled out all the key points in this handy blog. Here are the practical takeaways from our four experts as they looked back at Microsoft Ignite 2025 and what it all means for the future of data and AI for your organisation!

How Microsoft Fabric is Reshaping the Enterprise Data Platform

At a recent Oakland event co-hosted with Microsoft, we had the pleasure of welcoming Chris Webb, a seasoned Microsoft Fabric expert and member of the Fabric Customer Advisory Team. Chris ran a session exploring Microsoft Fabric in full, answering: Below, we round up the insight Chris shared during the informative session – a must-read if…

Should you build or buy your data platform?

“Build Versus Buy” is More a Scale of Options than a Binary Decision As consultants, we’ve been involved in helping our clients to decide which is the best software to invest in (or not invest in some cases). This is quite a responsibility as we are putting our reputation in the hands of a vendor,…

How to Harness Generative AI for Data-Driven Decision-Making

“In the boardroom, one fact remains constant: data is the lynchpin of contemporary business. How many organisations can genuinely claim to have fully operationalised their data assets, though? If your data strategy still resides on the periphery of business operations, rather than being its driving force, you’re in good company.”  That illuminating passage was written…

Why Invest in Data Quality?

This can seem like a rhetorical question: you should always invest in Data Quality! But we are still not investing enough: surveys show Data Quality issues are increasing in most organisations and on average, take up 34% of a Data Engineers time instead of them creating value by adding new features. This increases to 50% in large…

How to create a secure Azure Data Platform

There are many methods you can use to secure your data platform and the data contained within it within Azure. The security controls that will be most effective for each data platform differ based on the usage of the platform, the data sources for the platform and many other factors; Having a holistic view of…

How To Create a Data Product-Focused Data Strategy

Data engineering and storage costs are rising rapidly, with a 30% increase in 2022 (US and European cloud prices set to soar in 2023 – Techzine Europe). As US and European cloud prices were set to soar in 2023, data leaders searched for ways to maintain delivery speed while improving data governance and managing budgets….

How to manage spiralling cloud costs

“81% of IT teams directed to reduce or halt cloud spending by C-suite” VentureBeats, 2022 “Organisations with little or no cloud cost optimisation plans end up overspending on cloud services by up to 70% without deriving the expected value from it”  Gartner, 2022 Big Tech under pressure from cost-conscious cloud customers (ft.com) The cost of…

What is a data platform?

In today’s digitised business landscape, the ability to collect, analyse, and manage data effectively can be the critical difference between a business’s success and failure. But what exactly enables businesses to harness the full potential of their data? Enter the customer data platform. In this blog, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about data…

Does Microsoft Purview solve the Data Governance Challenge?

Microsoft Purview Data Governance for the cloud, on-premise, multi-cloud and office 365 workloads. Introduction Most organisations are exploding with data that has been collected, transformed, and reported on, but this data is often not well-tracked as the organisation becomes more data-driven, increasing two pain problems that have been growing for the last few decades: How…

Taming your data assets with Databricks

Safely, securely, and efficiently handling data at any scale is challenging. Here at Oakland, we’ve had years of experience helping complex organisations tame their vast data assets to draw meaningful insights from them. These years of experience and the fact we are passionately tech-agnostic enable us to recommend the right tool for the job. One…

Azure Bicep – Deploy a Data Platform in One Click

Azure Bicep is a declarative language for Azure infrastructure, it is the successor of ARM (Azure Resource Manager) templates. Bicep is one of the languages through which Azure has enabled the deployment of IaC (Infrastructure as Code).   What is Infrastructure as Code Infrastructure as Code is the declaration of compute, networking and infrastructure resources…