How a Data Integration Strategy empowers your enterprise

Did you know that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were created every single day in 2020? This data should have driven innovation and business outcomes, however, since this data is fragmented and lacks a clear data integration strategy, it mostly remained slumbering in silos.

Data integration is a process that aims to combine data from multiple sources into a unified view. If businesses want to use data for their competitive advantage, it needs to be accessible and actionable. Companies that mine data from different sources for insights, and then translate these insights into business outcomes will have a powerful competitive advantage.

“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.” ~Carly Fiorina

Data integration breaks down data silos

Enterprises use disparate applications to handle different day-to-day business functions. These applications are usually spread across an entire organization such as customer service, sales, finance, marketing, engineering, operations and more. In addition, social media, IoT sensors, SaaS solutions, and mobile applications lead to an exponential growth in data volume. Data silos are formed in most enterprises through these applications. When enterprise data is isolated this way, it results in poor communication between the departments and processes. When your data is siloed, critical decisions are made based on incomplete data.

According to Research Gate, Over 80% of enterprise Business Operations leaders say data integration is critical to ongoing operations.

A Data Integration Strategy empowers your enterprise

Data Insights have the power to boost business efficiency and make different departments work in synergy as a cohesive whole. To achieve this, you need to connect all the dots first. This is where a comprehensive data integration platform with powerful connectors and analytics-ready data warehousing comes in. It helps your organization focus on these key points that help realize your Data Integration Strategy.

Making data accessible

Available data is a huge advantage for your business; it’s as simple as that. When everyone in your company has access to a centralized data source, it becomes easier for them to access the whole truth and analyze the information for smarter decision-making.

Eliminating security issues

Having access to all possible types of regularly updated and synchronized information makes it much easier to provide a higher level of security. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning solutions can analyze suspicious activity and allow you to deal with it or set automated algorithms to do it for you.

Improving data clarity

Having a proper data integration strategy can help you optimize and enrich data with data from multiple systems. The data gleaned from different systems can be in different schemas and formats, the granularity level may also differ. With the ability to apply transformations at different stages, you can simplify the data before combining it. This gives you an opportunity to reduce complexity while maximizing the analytical insights you can garner.

Making data more valuable

Data integration adds value to your data. Data quality techniques detect the problems that need fixing and improve data characteristics to make data cleaner, more consistent, and more complete. The resulting datasets become much more valuable than raw data, as they are aggregated and calculated.

Simplifying data collaboration

Integrated and accessible data opens up a new world of opportunities for collaboration. Anyone who is relying on your data will be more effective and impactful with the data available in the right format.

The people you share this data with could include internal teams, senior management, or even partners. Quick access to information from different sources will give you a precise understanding of a situation.

Keeping data up to date

An integrated data strategy including cloud technologies can provide real-time updates. When data is in silos, it runs the risk of becoming outdated and inaccessible for collaboration. Data integration techniques connect these silos and reveal a single unified truth.

Facilitating smarter business decisions

Organized, integrated data sources can help you obtain a high level of precision and understanding across the enterprise. Having the means to analyze this data within the platform is a huge advantage. It will help you make the right moves at the right time.

Uniform access

The unified view approach allows businesses to view and access data from different locations and devices. Data integration and cloud-based warehousing solutions can help put everything in one place. It also makes it easier to get a more detailed view of the data as all the information from disparate sources can be combined, transformed and analyzed using a single system.

Common storage

Common storage means providing a unified view and copying all data to the data warehouse. This is a common and widely accepted approach to data integration. While the source system is waiting to be updated with data, you can create versions of your data to create snapshots of it for a specific period in time. Analysts and data scientists can work with a stored, versioned copy to run complex transformations and queries without putting data integrity at risk.

Read more about ETL tools here

DataChannel – An integrated ETL & Reverse ETL solution

• 100+ Data Sources. DataChannel’s ever-expanding list of supported data sources includes all popular advertising, marketing, CRM, financial, and eCommerce platforms and apps along with support for ad-hoc files, google sheets, cloud storages, relational databases, and ingestion of real-time data using webhooks. If we do not have the integration you need, reach out to our team and we will build it for you for free.
• Powerful scheduling and orchestration features with granular control over scheduling down to the exact minute.
• Granular control over what data to move. Unlike most tools which are highly opinionated and dictate what data they would move, we allow you the ability to choose down to field level what data you need. If you need to add another dimension or metric down the line, our easy to use UI lets you do that in a single click without any breaking changes to your downstream process.
• Extensive Logging, fault tolerance and automated recovery allows for dependable and reliable pipelines. If we are unable to recover, the extensive notifications will alert you via slack, app and email for taking appropriate action.
• Built to scale at an affordable cost. Our best in class platform is built with all ETL best practices built to handle billions of rows of data and will scale with your business when you need them to, while allowing you to only pay for what you use today.
• Get started in minutes. Get started in minutes with our self-serve UI or with the help of our on-boarding experts who can guide you through the process. We provide extensive documentation support and content to guide you all the way.
• Managed Data Warehouse. While cloud data warehouses offer immense flexibility and opportunity, managing them can be a hassle without the right team and resources. If you do not want the trouble of managing them in-house, use our managed warehouse offering and get started today. Whenever you feel you are ready to do it in-house, simply configure your own warehouse and direct pipelines to it.
• Activate your data with Reverse ETL. Be future-ready and don’t let your data sit idle in the data warehouse or stay limited to your BI dashboards. The unidimensional approach toward data management is now undergoing a paradigm change. Instead, use DataChannel’s reverse ETL offering to send data to the tools your business teams use every day. Set up alerts & notifications on top of your data warehouse and sync customer data across all platforms converting your data warehouse into a powerful CDP (Customer Data Platform). You can even preview the data without ever leaving the platform.