Modern businesses rely on increasing amounts of data to market, design, and manufacture products, streamline their operations, increase revenues and manage inventory to keep costs down. All team members must have access to the data, which must be reliable, precise, and secure.
To meet these demands companies require a comprehensive data solution that includes the right tools and technology to handle every stage of the data cycle: gathering the data, storing it, processing it and analysing. A well-rounded, efficient data solution should include the unified data platform (UDP) and business intelligence, data governance and a catalog of data.
When it is time to collect and store data, a company needs to ensure that it has the right capacity to increase or decrease its capacity to meet the demands. It is important to choose the appropriate database to store data and to have the tools to transfer data into and out of the database. It is also essential to eliminate unnecessary siloed data to reduce the size of operational databases.
Data infrastructure is the term used to describe the tools needed to gather and store data. This layer comprises software that can store, manage and transform data to be used for analysis and report generation. It also includes systems that produce visual representations of data to enable them to be used by analytics and business intelligence tools. This layer can be broken down further into two sub-components including data modeling and warehouse management.
