For decades, enterprise data infrastructure has been built around systems designed for a slower and more predictable world. CRUD-driven applications, batch ETL processes, and static dashboards shaped how leaders accessed and interpreted information. These systems delivered reports after the fact, relying on humans to query data, build dashboards, analyze results, and take actions.
Hundreds and thousands of enterprise data decisions were based on this paradigm; but it no longer fits the scale or velocity of modern businesses. Global enterprises now run on an ocean of transactions, telemetry, and signals. Leaders expect decisions to be informed, not next quarter, or even next week – but right now. At the same time, AI is setting the bar for what’s possible: contextual reasoning, proactive detection, and natural language interactions with data.
The question facing every CIO, CTO, CISO, and CEO is simple: Is your enterprise data infrastructure built for AI, or merely patched to survive it?
Defining Modern Enterprise Data Infrastructure
Three design patterns shaped legacy data infrastructure:
- CRUD applications (Create, Read, Update, Delete) as the foundation of enterprise workflows; for this, enterprise data systems would pool data into a store and use tools that executed CRUD operations on this data at rest.
- OLTP vs. OLAP separation, where real-time transactions lived in one system and analysis required exporting it into another
- Data lakes and warehouses are destinations for data, from where queries and dashboards become the interface for humans to extract insights.
These systems have delivered value in their time, but they embedded certain assumptions: data was static, analysis was retrospective, and human-powered querying was the bottleneck for making sense of it. Datasets became the backend, which meant an entire ecosystem of business applications was designed to work on this data as a static repository. But in the age of AI, these systems don’t make sense anymore.
As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, starkly put it to signal the end of the traditional backend, “business applications … are essentially CRUD databases with a bunch of business logic. All that business logic is moving to ADI agents, which will work across multiple repositories and CRUD operations.”
AI-ready data infrastructure breaks those assumptions. It is:
- Dynamic: Data is structured, enriched, and understood in flight.
- Contextual: Entities, relationships, and relevance are attached before data is stored.
- Governed: Lineage and compliance tagging are applied automatically.
- Conversational: Access is democratized; leaders and teams can interact with data directly, in natural language, without hunting dashboards, building charts, or memorizing query syntax.
The distinction isn’t about speed alone; it’s about intelligence at the foundation.
Business Impact across Decisions
Why does modernizing legacy data infrastructure matter now? Because AI has shifted expectations. Leaders want time-to-insight measured in seconds, not days.
ERP and CRM
Legacy ERP/CRM systems provided dashboards of what happened. AI-ready data systems can use patterns and data to anticipate what’s likely to occur and explain why. They can cast a wider net and find anomalies and similarities across decades of data, unlike human analysts who are constrained by the dataset they have access to, and querying/computing limitations. AI-ready data systems will be able to surface insights from sales cycles, procurement, or supply chains before they become revenue-impact issues.
Observability
Traditional observability platforms were designed to provide visibility into the health, performance, and behavior of IT systems and applications, but they were limited by the technology of the time in their ability to detect outages and issues when and where they happen. They required manual adjustments to prevent normal data fluctuations from being misinterpreted. AI-ready infrastructure can detect drift, correlate and identify anomalies, and suggest fixes before downtime occurs.
Security Telemetry
We’ve discussed legacy security systems many times before; they create an unmanageable tidal wave of alerts while being too expensive to manage, and nearly impossible to migrate away from. With the volume of logs and alerts continuing to expand, security teams can no longer rely on manual queries or post-hoc dashboards. AI-ready telemetry transforms raw signals into structured, contextual insights that drive faster, higher-fidelity decisions.
Across all these domains – and the dozens of others that encompass the data universe – the old question of how fast I can query is giving way to a better one: how close to zero can I drive time-to-insight?
Challenges & Common Pitfalls
Enterprises recognize the urgency, and according to a survey, 96% of global organizations have deployed AI models, but they encounter concerns and frustrations while trying to unlock their full potential. According to TechRadar, legacy methods and manual interventions are slowing down AI implementation when the infrastructure relies on time-consuming, error-prone manual steps. These include: –
- Data Silos and Schema Drift: When multiple systems are connected using legacy pipelines and infrastructure, integrations are fragile, costly, and not AI-friendly. AI compute would be wasted on pulling data together across silos, making AI-powered querying wasteful rather than time-saving. When the data is not parsed and normalized, AI systems have to navigate formats and schemas to understand and analyze the data. Shifts in schema from upstream systems could confound and befuddle AI systems.
- Dashboard Dependence: Static dashboards and KPIs have been the standard way for enterprises to track the data that matters, but they offer a limited perspective on essential data, limited by time, update frequency, and complexity. Experts were still required to run, update, and interpret these dashboards; and even then, they at best describe what happened, but are unable to adequately point leaders and decision-makers to what matters now.
- Backend databases with AI overlays: To be analyzed in aggregate, legacy systems required pools of data. Cloud databases, data lakes, data warehouses, etc., became the storage platforms for the enterprise. Compliance, data localization norms, and ad-hoc building have led to enterprises relying on data resting in various silos. Storage platforms are adding AI layers to make querying easier or to stitch data across silos.
While this is useful, this is retrofitting. Data still enters as raw, unstructured exhaust from legacy pipelines. The AI must work harder, governance is weaker, and provenance is murky. Without structuring for AI at the pipeline level, data storage risks becoming an expensive exercise, as each AI-powered query results in compute to transform raw and unstructured data across silos into helpful information.
- The Ol’ OLTP vs OLAP divide: For decades, enterprises have separated real-time transactions (OLTP) from analysis (OLAP) because systems couldn’t handle moving and dynamic data and running queries and analytics at the same time. The result? Leaders operate on lagging indicators. It’s like sending someone into a room to count how many people are inside, instead of tracking them as they walk in and out of the door.
- AI grafted onto bad data: As our Chief Security and Strategy officer, Preston Wood, said in a recent webinar –
“The problem isn’t that you have too much data – it’s that you can’t trust it, align it, or act on it fast enough.”
When AI is added on top of noisy data, poorly-governed pipelines magnify the problem. Instead of surfacing clarity, unstructured data automates confusion. If you expend effort to transform the data at rest with AI, you spend valuable AI compute resources doing so. AI on top of bad data is unreliable, and leaves enterprises second-guessing AI output and wiping out any gains from automation and Gen AI transformation.
These pitfalls illustrate why incremental fixes aren’t enough. AI needs an infrastructure that is designed for it from the ground up.
Solutions and Best Practices
Modernizing requires a shift in how leaders think about data: from passive storage to active, intelligent flow.
- Treat the pipeline as the control plane.
Don’t push everything into a lake, a warehouse, or a tool. You can structure, enrich, and normalize the data while it is in motion. You can also segment or drop repetitive and irrelevant data, ensuring that downstream systems consume signal, not noise.
- Govern in flight.
When the pipeline is intelligent, data is tagged with lineage, sensitivity, and relevance as it moves. This means you know not just what the data is, but where it came from and why it matters. This vastly improves compliance and governance – and most importantly, builds analytics and analysis-friendly structures, compared to post-facto cataloging.
- Collapse OLTP and OLAP.
With AI-ready pipelines, real-time transactions can be analyzed as they happen. You don’t need to shuttle data into a separate OLAP system for insight. The analysis layer lives within the data plane itself. Using the earlier analogy, you track people as they enter the room, not by re-counting periodically. And you also log their height, their weight, the clothes they wear, discern patterns, and prepare for threats instead of reacting to them.
- Normalize once, reuse everywhere.
Adopt and use open schemas and common standards so your data is usable across business systems, security platforms, and AI agents without constant rework. Use AI to cut past data silos and create a ready pool of data to put into analytics without needing to architect different systems and dashboards.
- Conversation as the front door.
Enable leaders and operators to interact with data through natural language. When the underlying pipeline is AI-powered, the answers are contextual, explainable, and immediate.
This is what separates data with AI features from truly AI-ready data infrastructure.
Telemetry and Security Data
Nowhere are these principles tested more severely than in telemetry. Security and observability teams ingest terabytes of logs, alerts, and metrics every day. Schema drift is constant, volumes are unpredictable, and the cost of delay is measured in breaches and outages.
Telemetry proves the rule: if you can modernize here, you can modernize everywhere.
This is where DataBahn comes in. Our platform was purpose-built to make telemetry AI-ready:
- Smart Edge & Highway structure, filter, and enrich data in motion, ensuring only relevant, governed signal reaches storage or analysis systems
- Cruz automates data movement and transformation, ensuring AI-ready structured storage and tagging
- Reef transforms telemetry into a contextual insight layer, enabling natural language interaction and agent-driven analytics without queries or dashboards.
In other words, instead of retrofitting AI on top of raw data, DataBahn ensures that your telemetry arrives already structured, contextualized, and explainable. Analytics tools and dashboards can leverage a curated and rich data set; Gen AI tools can be built to make AI accessible and ensure analytics and visualization are a natural language query away.
Conclusion
Enterprise leaders face a choice. Continue patching legacy infrastructure with AI “features” in the hope of achieving AI-powered analytics, or modernize your foundations to be AI-ready and enabled for AI-powered insights.
Modernizing legacy data infrastructure for analytics requires converting raw data into usable and actionable, structured information that cuts across formats, schemas, and destinations. It requires treating pipelines as control planes, governing data in flight, and collapsing the gap between operations and analysis. It means not being focused on creating dashboards, but optimizing time-to-insight – and driving that number towards zero.
Telemetry shows us what’s possible. At DataBahn, we’ve built a foundation to enable enterprises to turn data from liability into their most strategic asset.
Ready to see it in action? Get an audit of your current data infrastructure to assess your readiness to build AI-ready analytics. Experience how our intelligent telemetry pipelines can unlock clarity, control, and competitive advantage.