“In the age of digital, data as a game-changer is an understatement,” begins Emil Capino, founder, president and COO of Info Alchemy Corporation, as he touches upon the concept of data being a flywheel of innovation, which leads to digital transformation. Backed by more than 20 years of experience in IT consulting, Capino leads his team at Info Alchemy to embrace the “Data as a flywheel of innovation” concept, which was popularized by Amazon Web Services. While data stored on-premises stifles growth and innovation, Capino believes that data must be stored in the cloud so organizations can fully leverage the latest and emerging technologies to enable innovation and accelerate their transformation. Let face it: To stay relevant in the data era, organizations must keep their data flywheel spinning. In order to tap into the diverse benefits—performance, scalability, reliability, availability, analytic engines, and massive economies of scale—of the cloud, data lakes are an ideal workload to be deployed in the cloud—a compelling alternative to traditional on-premise infrastructure. Evidently, early adopters of big data platforms are now moving their data lakes from on-premises implementations to the cloud. On the other hand, it is challenging for enterprises with on-premises deployments to conform to this trend. This is where Info Alchemy is in a class by itself.