Connect Disparate Data Sources With Confidence

Now more than ever, businesses in every vertical are inundated with vast amounts of data coming at them from various sources. And those sources keep growing as data is created by an ever-expanding number of apps, systems, and devices. Whether it’s customer interactions, supply chain operations, or financial transactions, data is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise.

However, the sheer volume and variety of data that’s available creates a significant challenge. You must ensure information is accessible, accurate, trusted, and actionable. This is where data integration has become crucial.

As I shared during a recent TDWI conference in San Diego, unifying data from multiple sources enables you to utilize the full potential of all your data to drive informed decision-making and strategic growth of the business. This includes hybrid data integration, which connects data from across cloud and on-premises environments.

Four Business Reasons to Integrate Your Hybrid Data

Unifying disparate data sources while ensuring quality and compliance are essential for success. Following proven approaches for integration, implementing a robust data integration strategy that supports your growth objectives, and using a modern data platform are all required to connect your data.

Reasons to bring your data together in a single platform include:

1. Overcoming Data Silos

Silos isolate data sets, making them inaccessible to other parts of your organization. These silos can arise from different software systems, geographic locations, or employees using their own data because they don’t trust or can’t easily access enterprise data. Data silos hinder collaboration and lead to incomplete insights. Data integration breaks down these silos, providing a unified view that enhances collaboration, decision-making, and comprehensive analysis.

2. Ensuring Data Consistency & Quality

With data flowing from so many sources, maintaining consistency and quality becomes a daunting task. Inconsistencies and inaccuracies in data can lead to flawed analysis and poor decision-making. By contrast, comprehensive data integration ensures that data is standardized, trusted, and accurate, providing a single source of truth that gives you confidence in your outcomes. Consistent, high-quality data is critical for accurate reporting and reliable business intelligence.

3. Enhancing Operational Efficiency

A unified view of critical information allows analysts and decision-makers to identify trends, optimize processes, and allocate resources more effectively. Integrated data also streamlines workflows, reduces redundancies, and minimizes errors, leading to improved operational efficiency. That’s because data integration helps you operate more smoothly, have agility to respond to market changes, and maintain a competitive edge.

4. Supporting Compliance & Security

In our era of stringent regulatory requirements, ensuring compliance is essential. Modern data integration platforms offer robust security features and compliance controls, helping you manage sensitive data across various environments. This includes implementing data quality rules, orchestration workflows, and secure data transfers, which are essential for maintaining regulatory compliance and protecting data integrity.

Four Benefits of Hybrid Data Integration

The ability to master data integration and achieve seamless operations across cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments can unlock significant value across the business. With integrated, hybrid data, you realize these benefits:

1. Improved Organizational Decision-Making

Connected hybrid data provides a comprehensive view of business operations, enabling data-driven decision-making. By having access to accurate, up-to-date data, business leaders can make more informed choices that drive strategic growth and competitive advantage. When hybrid data is fully integrated, decision-making increases across all aspects of the business.

2. Increased Efficiency & Cost Savings

Bringing together data pipelines reduces the time and resources required for ongoing data management. This efficiency, coupled with automated data processes, translates into cost savings, reduced manual intervention, and optimized resource utilization. Plus, integrated data reduces the need for multiple data management tools, especially when using the right platform, which further lowers costs.

3. Enhanced Collaboration & Coordination

Data integration encourages data sharing across various departments and systems. When you have a data platform that offers easy data integration and accessibility, analysts and organizational teams can seamlessly share data and work together using the same information. Enhanced coordination leads to better alignment of efforts, more cohesive strategies, and improved overall performance, which also improves trust in your data.

4. Barrier-Free Access to Valuable Insights

Integrated data offers richer, more contextual insights than single data sets. This lets you uncover details that may have previously been hidden. These details give you a better understanding of customers, markets, and internal operations. As a result, you can make informed decisions, develop highly targeted strategies, and respond more effectively to changing market conditions.

Four Best Practices to Integrate Hybrid Data

One of the main questions I get asked during presentations is how to get started with data integration—especially with data spanning the cloud and on-premises systems. Many analysts and other data users are accustomed to complex processes that require IT help or advanced skill sets.

That is no longer the case! With the right strategy and data platform, hybrid data integration is easier than you may think. Here are four steps to ensure success:

1. Assess Your Data Integration Needs

Determining your organization’s specific needs is the essential first step. You’ll want to identify the data sources that need to be integrated, the types of data being handled, and the business processes that will benefit from integration. This assessment helps you choose the right data integration tools and strategy.

2. Pick the Right Data Platform

Select a robust data platform that simplifies data integration processes and makes it easy to build data pipelines to new sources. Also look for a platform that offers flexibility, scalability, and ease of use. Features such as codeless API integration, pre-built connectors, and data profiling capabilities significantly streamline the integration process and reduce the time to value. 

3. Ensure Data Quality & Governance

Comprehensive integration should not come at the expense of data quality. Maintaining quality is a continuous process that entails enacting data quality rules, performing regular data profiling, and establishing governance policies to ensure integrated data remains accurate and reliable. This approach helps mitigate data inconsistencies and ensures compliance with internal and regulatory standards.

4. Benefit from Automated Processes

Automating data integration processes greatly reduces manual efforts and minimizes errors. Integration tools and data pipeline orchestration can automate data workflows. Automation enhances efficiency while also enabling real-time data integration to deliver  timely insights.

Consider a Complete Data Platform that Simplifies Integration

Data integration is a necessity for businesses that want to thrive in our data-driven world. It requires a modern platform that allows you to connect data in hybrid environments without using a variety of tools. For example, the Actian Data Platform offers end-to-end integration, data warehousing capabilities, and analytics across your entire hybrid environment.

This single, unified data platform offers real-time insights along with superior price performance. Users across all skill levels can connect, manage, and analyze data using a fully integrated suite of data solutions, eliminating the need for multiple tools or manual code.

We can meet you wherever you are on your data journey while making data easy to access and use. Our platform can help you go from data to decisions with confidence, enabling you to:

• Increase revenue
• Reduce costs
• Mitigate risk
• Win market share
• Support a data-driven culture

With the Actian Data Platform, you also benefit from native integration and data quality, flexible deployment, and ease of use. In addition, our dashboards give you visibility into activities so you can see information in an easy-to-understand format. Curious how the platform can transform data integration and management at your organization? Get a custom demo. I think you’ll be impressed.

About Derek Comingore

Derek Comingore has worked in the database and advanced analytics industries for the past two decades at established and startup companies. Derek successfully started and exited a systems integrator business he built that helped early Massively Parallel Processing customers. Derek holds three degrees including an MBA with a concentration in Data Science. When Derek is not working in databases or models, he enjoys spending time with friends and family on the lakes and slopes in Delafield, Wisconsin.