Understanding Data Integration
What is Data Integration
Why it is important
How to use it
Who can use it
What is Data Integration
Data integration means combining data residing in various sources and providing users with a unified view of them. Data integration will make sure a company has access to all of its information in one place and in a way that makes sense to everyone who needs it. Storing and processing multiple sets of information in one place offers flexibility, performance, and cost efficiency.
Why it is important
Businesses require access to accurate, relevant, and up-to-date information to be competitive. Some of the importance of data integration include:
Better Decision Making
It gives businesses up-to-the-minute data to use to make fast, high-quality decisions. It also saves time and money, with businesses able to focus on growing the business, confident that they have accurate data at their fingertips.
Improved Productivity
With data spread across a variety of systems, employees waste valuable time looking for data in different systems. Data integration technology saves billions of dollars in lost productivity each year by centralizing the company’s most important data.
Access to Important Data
In a connected world, data has become more valuable than ever. Connecting the applications and cloud services to an enterprise data hub can help gain greater insight into the data and leverage it for more strategic business initiatives.
How to use it
There are three major ways you can implement or use data integration:
Open-source software
Mage
Airbyte
Write the code from scratch or use open-source libraries
Singer
Meltano
Mage
Write custom code
Software-as-a-service (SAAS)
Stitch
Fivetran
Hightouch (reverse ETL)
Census (reverse ETL)
Who can use it
Data integration is an essential service for any company that desires to manage, analyze, and prepare data. It helps in the process of data collection, storage, retrieval and sharing. Data integration means you have everything in one place. As a result, data preparation and analysis can happen at a rapid pace.
Businesses must constantly re-assess and refine the foundation of their organization to stay afloat. Competition is heated, and relying on inefficient operational activities can ultimately lead to the downfall of a company.
Every scaling business must be prepared to work with large and complex data sets. And failing to organize this data in a cohesive manner can prove to be detrimental.