From raw data to business value – Medallion Architecture

At CIMSOLUTIONS, we believe that sharing knowledge is the key to sustainable growth—for both our clients and our employees. That’s why we actively invest in Special Interest Groups (SIGs): specialized communities where colleagues inspire each other, explore new technologies, and share practical experiences on topics that are high on our clients’ agendas.

One of the topics that received a lot of attention within our SIG Architecture last year was the Medallion Architecture, also known as the Multi-Hop Architecture. This architecture forms the foundation of modern data platforms for a growing number of organizations.

What is Medallion Architecture?

The Medallion Architecture was introduced in 2020 by Databricks[1] and has since become a widely used blueprint for designing scalable data platforms. The goal of this architecture is simple yet powerful: enrich and structure data step by step, so that it evolves from raw data into valuable business information. The architecture consists of three layers:

• Bronze (Source Data): unprocessed, raw data from various source systems;
• Silver (Corrected and Structured Data): cleansed and standardized data, ready for broad consumption;
• Gold (Business-Ready Data): highly enriched datasets that are immediately suitable for dashboards, analyses, and AI models.

With each step, data quality increases, as does its reliability—and thus its value to the organization. Just as Olympic medals symbolize the progression of achievements from bronze to gold, the Medallion Architecture demonstrates how data is transformed step by step from raw input to valuable business results.

Theory vs. Practice

In real-world implementations, we increasingly see several extensions to the basic concept of the Medallion Architecture:

• Landing Zone: a preparatory layer before Bronze, in which raw files are captured directly from the source systems, regardless of their format. In this phase, data formats and metadata are not yet transformed, but are stored securely and consistently. This ensures uniformity, reproducibility, and improved manageability of the entire loading process;
• Platinum Layer: More and more government organizations (municipalities, ministries) are establishing a Platinum layer for federated data systems. This layer contains data models that are coordinated between multiple organizations or chain partners. This creates a shared language and standard that allows data from different organizations to be exchanged consistently.

Impact of AI on Medallion Architecture

With the rise of AI-driven organizations, the importance of high-quality, well-managed data is growing faster than ever. The Medallion Architecture plays a crucial role in this:

• AI models require consistency: AI models are extremely sensitive to poor or inconsistent input. Data from Silver and Gold layers ensures reliability and repeatability;
• Data and AI governance: With data lineage across different layers, ownership becomes clearer, auditability becomes easier, and privacy-sensitive data is better protected—critical now that AI is supporting more and more decisions.
• Faster time to insight: Because data quality is higher, AI models can be trained and rolled out faster, increasing the innovative power of organizations.

Medallion Architecture at our clients

More and more large organizations are switching to the Medaillon Architecture as the foundation for their information provisioning. For example, several government institutions have adopted it as their core architecture, or they have implemented their own version within their data platform.

Our consultants help these organizations design, build, and optimize their IT working environments. In the SIGs, we discuss practical cases, challenges, and best practices—and translate them into concrete solutions for our clients.

Do you want to make an impact at enterprise organizations and actively contribute to knowledge development? Are you interested in joining our SIGs and participating in discussions on topics such as Medallion Architecture, digital sovereignty, and AI literacy? Then come work at CIMSOLUTIONS. We are looking for curious, driven IT professionals who want to grow together with colleagues and make a difference.

Klim Mikhailov
Data + AI Engineer / Architect

[1] Databricks, the inventor of this pattern, is also the founder of other open source technologies such as Apache Spark, Delta Lake, MLflow and Unity Catalog.