Data Silos Cost $3.1 Trillion Annually. Kafka Alone Won't Fix Them.

Data silos cost the global economy $3.1 trillion annually. Data gets isolated by sinks, sources, streams, and teams. It sits unused while its value depreciates.

Kafka is an excellent technical fix for data synchronization, sharing, and migration. But Kafka can't fix inefficient processes. It can't onboard users, promote discoverability, or automate manual approval chains.

Kafka scales faster than the teams managing it. That's where Conduktor comes in.

How Silos Harm Your Business

Siloed data slows insights to leaders. It gets excluded from analytics and business-critical functions, creating flawed analyses that hurt decision-making and competitiveness.

Siloed procedures are harder to solve. Kafka decouples producers and consumers, but decoupling doesn't make data shareable by default.

Someone has to monitor streams to understand what data exists and where. Without in-stream visibility, teams lose track of ownership and usage as Kafka grows. Some organizations never assign ownership at all, so data goes undiscovered.

Platform teams must promote discoverability, authorize accounts, and manage permissions. Beyond 10 clusters or projects, a single platform team can't sustain this manually. Downstream applications wait. Innovation stalls.

Kafka Is Infrastructure, Not a Solution

Kafka connects disparate parts of data infrastructure. Its publish/subscribe model decouples producers and consumers, enabling asynchronous communication and data reuse. One message reaches multiple subscribers. Data stays in motion, lives in multiple places, and reaches various teams.

Kafka also supports hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, eliminating infrastructure-based silos.

But Kafka alone is insufficient. Operationalizing Kafka across a complex organization requires visibility into streams, data discoverability, regulated access, and approval workflows.

Beyond 10 clusters, onboarding requests pile up. Data duplicates. Teams can't find what they need. Platform teams become bottlenecks.

What Conduktor Adds

Conduktor fills the gaps Kafka doesn't address:

Self-service onboarding: Platform teams define guardrails. Developers spin up accounts and clusters independently within a secure framework. No tickets, no ad hoc provisioning.

Data discoverability: Unified resource management helps teams find data while maintaining consistent policies and ownership.

Granular access control: Manage authorization policies, audit access logs, and standardize permissions across clusters.

Real Examples: Two Banks

Two European banks with large Kafka deployments faced similar problems.

Bank A: Kafka distributed across eight teams in different time zones. Any action—onboarding users, managing permissions—took weeks. No tooling to track infrastructure. Result: duplicated data, high costs.

Bank B: A platform team of seven overseeing 30+ clusters and 18 business units. Every action required platform team intervention. Slow workflows, stalled innovation.

Both use Conduktor. Bank A evaluates self-service features that let developers onboard independently. Bank B tracks usage across clusters and automates provisioning.

Unified Data Unlocks New Use Cases

European stock exchange: Previously, trading algorithm data was only available after market close. By making data available during the trading day, they unlocked new use cases: trade matching algorithms, hour-by-hour replays, faster insights. No disruption to existing flows.

Online retailer: Kafka powers their shopping cart and real-time analytics. They track the customer journey—when items are added, what's added alongside them, time to checkout. This granular data improved recommendation engines and analytics.

The Technical and Organizational Fix

Kafka provides the backbone to remove data silos. Conduktor helps teams unify procedures and workflows.

Platform teams balance autonomy with stability. Developers discover and access data without waiting. Data silos break down.

Book a demo to see how Conduktor handles your specific environment.