Modern businesses rely on ever more data to effectively market, design and manufacture products, streamline operations, increase profits and manage inventory to hold the line on costs. This information must be easily accessible by all team members, and it must be accurate, reliable and safe.
To meet these demands companies require a comprehensive data solution that comes with the right tools and technology to manage all stages of the data lifecycle: gathering, storing, processing and analyzing. A well-rounded, effective data solution should include a unified data platform (UDP) as well as data governance, business intelligence and the creation of a data catalog.
When it is time to collect and store information, a business has to ensure that it has the capacity to increase or decrease its capacity to meet the demands. This includes choosing the best database to store data and the tools needed to transfer the data into and out of it. It is also essential to identify and eliminate unnecessary siloed data in order to reduce the size of the operational databases.
The tools required to store and collect data are generally described as the “data infrastructure”. It consists of software for managing, storing and changing data to be used for analysis and reporting. This layer also includes systems that create visual representations of data that enable them to be used by analytics and business intelligence tools. This layer can be broken down further into two components: data modeling and data warehouse management.