Modern businesses are relying on more and more data to effectively develop, market and manufacture products, streamline operations, increase profits and manage inventory to hold the line on costs. The data must be easily accessible by everyone on the team and must be reliable, accurate and secure.
To meet these requirements, businesses require a comprehensive solution that incorporates the tools and technologies necessary to manage every stage of the lifecycle of data: gathering, storing, and processing. A comprehensive data solution must include data governance, business analytics and a data catalogue.
When it is about storing and collecting data, businesses need to ensure that it has the right capacity to increase or decrease its capacity to meet demand. This involves selecting the right database to store data, and the tools to move that data in and out of it. It also means identifying and eliminating unnecessary siloed data in order to reduce the overall size of the operational databases.
Data infrastructure is the term used to describe the tools used to store and collect data. This layer contains software to store, manage and transform data for analysis and report generation. This layer also includes systems to create visual representations of the data to make it more usable by analytics and business intelligence tools. This layer can also be divided into two components which are managing data warehouses and data modeling.
