Modern business is relying on ever-growing amounts of data to effectively market, design and manufacture products, streamline operations, boost revenue and manage inventory to keep costs in check. This information must be readily accessible to all team members, and it must be reliable, accurate and secure.
To meet these demands, companies need a comprehensive data solution that comes with the right tools and technologies to manage each stage of the data lifecycle: collecting, storing, processing and analyzing. A comprehensive, efficient data solution should include an unifying data platform (UDP) and data governance, business intelligence and an inventory of data.
When it’s time to store and collect data, a business needs to ensure that it has the capacity to scale up or back down to meet special info the demands. This means selecting the right database to store data and the tools that transfer the data into and out of it. It is also important to find and eliminate unnecessary siloed information to reduce the size of the operational databases.
The tools required to collect and store data are typically known as the “data infrastructure”. It consists of software for storing, managing and transforming data for analysis and reporting. This layer also contains tools for creating visual representations of data in order to make it more accessible to analytics and business intelligence tools. This layer is further broken down into two parts including data modeling and warehouse management.