Do I need a datalake in my use case?
The point of a "Data Lake" is to store unstructured data together, along with the related meta-data, all in one place. The data is usually stored in the format in which it was recorded i.e. the raw format. Data is then only extracted and processed for usage as required.

There is a nice article that compares data warehouses and data lakes in an unbiased and practical manner.



From your description of your data and the problems you want to solve, I don't personally think a data lake would be required.

Perhaps your colleague is planning to create a data lake for larger purposes, e.g. to house the data for many projects such as yours, which might also want to use your data? There are the issues of security, data ownership and data stewardship to think about in this case. Questions to answer would be:


who actually owns the data?
who is allowed to use what data?
who is allowed to view what data?
who is responsible for ensuring data is available at all times?