Data management is the key to unlock the true potential of your business. The right combination of data management tools can make all the difference to your data strategy. Access to critical data can drive important business decisions and also provide metrics to measure the success of those decisions. Being in control of your data is being control of your organization’s future. Easier said than done!
The C level executives don’t have an easy task while deciding on a data management strategy for their organizations, given the explosion of data from various channels, social media, the big data gold rush, changing market needs and competition. They are constantly on a search for the right tools to manage and exploit this genie out of the bottle. ETL (extract-transform-load), ESB (enterprise service bus,) MDM (master data management) and data warehousing (DW) are the usual suspects that show up on this search. But each of these complex approaches in isolation has its limitations.
Data virtualization is the cool, nimble and light-footed entrant to this category. Data virtualization presents data as an abstract layer, independent of underlying database systems, structures and storage. It is steadily being adopted by more and more businesses set to modernize their data and application architectures comprised of client-server, hybrid on premise and cloud, IoT, mobile, SOA and REST WS.
ETL, the prevalent technique more commonly used, makes copies of data sets and transfers it to be physically stored in a data warehouse. The drawbacks however, are long time delays and the high costs associated with the delays and manual query submission. ESB, another data integration method that uses messaging between software applications, is not query-based and involves complex infrastructure and configurations.
Data virtualization overcomes the limitations inherent in these data integration methods by abstracting data from heterogeneous sources in real-time into an easily consumable virtual layer, preserving all the metadata. Data virtualization used in conjunction with these other systems, is being adopted by companies across all industries and use cases.
Raise your glass if you are one among the growing leaders using or considering data virtualization to end the days of delayed and complex path to business information.
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I totally agree with your view that right combination of data management tools can make a huge difference to your data strategy. Absolutely enjoyed reading your post, thanks!