In any business environment, consolidation is the key to maximising efficiency. People and resources must be brought together to ensure that operations are streamlined, decisions are made in an orderly fashion, employees are kept in check, and more. In recent times, one of the most important resources in the business world has been big data, which companies across the globe have used for its various benefits.
But big data, as its name suggests, is immense, both in volume and complexity. As such, it can often be a difficult resource to store, manage, and utilise effectively. To address this obstacle, however, the practice of data integration has been developed, whose role is to prevent the mismanagement of big data by consolidating it. This blog will focus on the challenges of data integration, but before doing so, we will provide a basic outline and example of the data integration process.
So what exactly is data integration? Data integration is the process of consolidating data from multiple sources into one location, often referred to as a data warehouse. By doing this, companies can gain a more clear, unified, and descriptive display of the data they have collected. When data is separated into distinct silos, rather than in one centralised location, the management process becomes more inconvenient, and the disconnect between various teams within your company grows exponentially.
Example of Data Integration
Take, for instance, the company Supercell. Supercell is a mobile game development company based in Finland. Responsible for managing several world-renowned games such as Clash Royale and Clash of Clans, Supercell uses a wide array of tools to run its business:
- Netsuite to manage company profits and expenditures
- Google Analytics to track its popularity and website events
- Unreal Engine to develop new games
- YouTube and Facebook advertisements to increase membership
In 2010, during the company’s early stages, Supercell managed each operation with independent silos of data. However, as the company experienced a profound increase in popularity, they decided to consolidate their data into one centralised location. By doing this, business operations became more streamlined, ensuring that Supercell could meet the demands of their rapidly growing player base.
To explore the benefits of data integration at a more in-depth level, please take a look at one of our previous blogs addressing this topic.
Challenges of Data Integration
Data integration, as simple as it may seem, is not free of challenges. Failing to overcome such challenges may cause your business to stagnate, lose clientele, and fall extremely behind your competitors. Here, we will highlight three of the major challenges, along with some solutions, associated with data integration that you should expect to encounter:
1. Unpunctuality
Many business processes and businesses, in general, rely on the intake of real-time data. For example, if you manage an e-commerce site for home appliances, you would need real-time data to present targeted advertisements or send customised emails to your customers. Without the proper software, however, collecting and consolidating the data promptly to perform this task would be difficult.
Manually collecting and updating data is a possible solution, but is extremely unrealistic and exhaustive. Rather, an automated data curation tool like Amazon Redshift or CloverDX will be able to perform this task at a much faster rate (with increased accuracy as well).
2. Lack of data quality/integrity
When attempting to combine data from various silos into one location, the risk for error to arise is great. For instance, a loss of information and accuracy may occur when trying to copy a portion of data to another storage site.
Data check and cleansing before the integration is a possible solution. Validating your data as soon as it is moved from one location to another will drastically reduce the amount of inaccurate data that enters your systems. By designating a team to take care of this activity, efficiency will be increased as well.
3. Lack of security
Consolidating data into one location streamlines business operation, ensuring that the data remains secure and confidential becomes a difficult task. With fewer information silos, fewer barriers to data are needed to gain access to it, and with all of your company’s data centralised in one location, it becomes extremely vulnerable to external breaches.
A possible solution to this challenge would be obtaining software programs, like Microsoft’s cloud suite—Office 365, often possessing advanced access control features like multi-factor authentication (MFA) that significantly boost data security.
Conclusion
With the various challenges associated with data integration highlighted above, it may seem like a daunting and undesirable task to undertake for your company. Additionally, not every company will benefit in the same way from the process, and in fact, some will likely benefit more from keeping their data silos separated. Nevertheless, the many benefits of data integration are just as important to consider. If your company aims to stay afloat in the increasingly competitive market, it is certainly a process that you should think about and implement.
About the author: Mark Roychowdhury is a Copywriter Intern at ei² niche consulting for #data #insights #performance www.eisquare.co.uk