Data is becoming more integral to businesses of all sizes, however enterprise-level companies may face specific challenges when it comes to managing their data. Especially if they’ve been in business for a long time, it’s easy to have errors in your data, data sourced from a variety of different platforms and systems, and other problems with your data storage. This can become particularly detrimental when it’s hard to home in on a single source of truth for your data, adding unnecessary hours to your employees’ workweeks as they jump through extra hoops in order to retrieve the right data.
Obviously, that sort of situation is less than ideal when it comes to actionably using your data analytics or even handling various data protection tasks. Business users can thus benefit significantly from a concept known as data virtualization, which can provide ad-hoc access instead of requiring divergent sources of data to be gathered in order to analyze historical data rises or access personal data about social media users engaging with ad campaigns. Read on to learn more about how data virtualization can help get your company on the right path when it comes to better managing your data.
Table of Contents
Data virtualization offers an alternative approach to traditional data processes.
In traditional data processes, business users will likely be faced with a process known as ETL. ETL stands for extract, transform, and load, and involves data being manually accessed in order to be edited and combined with other data and then uploaded back into a specific platform. This manual process of copying data from one source into another container can be incredibly tedious, ultimately eating up a lot of your company’s time and resources. Data virtualization, thankfully, offers an alternative to this way of managing your data. Rather than worry about maintaining multiple systems and whether or not you’ve copied the correct data from one platform to another, data virtualization unifies different data sources into one, integrated platform.
The functionality offered by data virtualization is beneficial in other ways, too.
Obviously, having the cloud integration provided by data virtualization can be a valuable bridge between multiple data systems and platforms. However, the benefits and functionality that data virtualization provides vendors and business leaders alike go far beyond just serving as a bridge from one place to another. Virtualization can play a role in data access, as well as other areas of data science, including the delivery of data and the task of combining data from multiple sources. All of these functions can be tremendously helpful when it comes to streamlining the way your company handles data, whether it’s using it to inform business decisions about markets to expand into or leveraging data to forecast sales in the fourth quarter of business. Other benefits that come from virtualizing your data involve mitigating the likelihood of creating errors in your data as well as reducing the overall amount of data storage you need in order to do business in the first place. You can learn more about virtualization by reading up on the 2020 GigaOM Data Virtualization report, which is an independent treatise on the overall landscape of virtualization in the world of data science.
As you can see, when a company chooses to virtualize its data, it can offer a variety of benefits beyond just serving as a single access point or repository for your data. Virtualization can be a major boon for enterprises, especially if you feel like your data is stuck in disparate silos. As such, it’s well-worth considering switching to virtualization if your company is currently stuck using the move traditional ETL approach to its data, or even uses a data warehouse.
My passion of providing Tech to Gadget lovers with the latest ups & downs happening in the World of Technology and innovation made this blog come true.