Data Integration

 What is Data Integration?

Data integration is the process of bringing data from disparate sources together to provide users with a unified view. The premise of data integration is to make data more freely available and easier to consume and process by systems and users. Data integration done right can reduce IT costs, free-up resources, improve data quality, and foster innovation all without sweeping changes to existing applications or data structures. And though IT organizations have always had to integrate, the payoff for doing so has potentially never been as great as it is right now.

Companies with mature data integration capabilities have significant advantages over their competition, which includes:

Increased operational efficiency by reducing the need to manually transform and combine data sets

Better data quality through automated data transformations that apply business rules to data

More valuable insight development through a holistic view of data that can be more easily analyzed

A digital business is built around data and the algorithms that process it, and it extracts maximum value from its information assets—from everywhere across the business ecosystem, at any time it is needed. Within a digital business, data and related services flow unimpeded, yet securely, across the IT landscape. Data integration enables a full view of all the information flowing through an organization and gets your data ready for analysis.

Data Integration Resource

Modernize Your Data and Analytics Architecture

Check out these 13 use cases to learn how to support today’s complex data and analytics landscape.

The Evolution of Data Integration

The scope and importance of data integration has completely changed. Today, we augment business capabilities by leveraging standard SaaS applications, all while continuing to develop custom applications. With a rich ecosystem of partners ready to leverage an organization’s information, the information about an organization’s services that gets exposed to customers is now as important as the services themselves. Today, integrating SaaS, custom, and partner applications and the data contained within them, is a requirement. These days, an organization differentiates by combining business capabilities in a unique way. For example, many companies are analyzing data in-motion and at-rest, using their findings to create business rules, and then applying those rules to respond even faster to new data. Typical goals for this type of innovation are stickier user experiences and improved business operations.

How does data integration work?

One of the biggest challenges organizations face is trying to access and make sense of the data that describes the environment in which it operates. Every day, organizations capture more and more data, in a variety of formats, from a larger number of data sources. Organizations need a way for employees, users, and customers to capture value from that data. This means that organizations have to be able to bring relevant data together wherever it resides for the purposes of supporting organization reporting and business processes.