The Dos and Don’ts of Data Integration

In the past 10 years, several enterprises have been deploying some or the other sort of data integration technology. While some enterprises believe that they have the problem of data integration solved, others don’t.  Data Integration is a dynamic process and needs to be carefully planned and executed depending upon the frequently changing technology.

Here are a few important changes in data integration technology:

There is increasing use of public cloud resources for hosting and operating applications and data stores. This has increased the integration challenges for the enterprises and redirected to a completely new way of thinking about data integration and technology.

There has been a remarkable advancement of big data, both in the cloud and on-premise, where the capacity of data storage can go beyond a petabyte. These systems have unique and specialized data integration requirements. Databases are coming forth with more complex and mixed data models which serve multiple purposes. These focus on high performance and so they need data integration software and solutions that can keep up with these complex requirements.

Organizations that understand their complex data integration needs, leverage data integration approaches and understand that they have more decisions to make.  These decisions can be boiled down to some simple dos and don’ts.

1. Do architecture a data integration plan that involves all business units.

Even if you already have existing data integration solutions, you need to consider your data integration requirements. This typically includes lists of sources and target data stores, performance, governance, security, data cleanup, etc.

The plan should be designed in such a way that it holds sufficient information and detail that can be inferred by both IT and non-IT organizations. To reduce ambiguity, it should have a well-structured road-map that includes logical and physical data integration architecture.

2. Do allocate adequate resources and budget:

Data integration is not an isolated activity and it needs lots of resources and enough funding. Lack of funding of the tasks and technology under the data integration road-map typically means data integration efforts die the death by a thousand cuts. So the data problems remain unsolved and that costs far more than the money you think that you’re saving.

3. Don’t think that all data integration solutions are the same:

Most of the enterprises take technology for granted by believing that all data integration solutions are the same without evaluating and testing these. The fact is that data integration technology varies a lot in terms of their functions and the types of problems they can address. For your business, you need to exclusively assess these platforms and then become an expert in sorting out the best integration technology according to your requirements and business infrastructure.

4. Don’t overlook performance, governance, and security:

Several enterprises which implement data integration solutions often neglect these. This is because they do not understand how these concepts are related to data integration. But the fact is it that these are concepts that should be core constituents into the data integration solution from logical architecture to physical deployment.  If these items are missed, you’ll have to add them later down the line.

While some of the factors seem obvious, most of the mentioned ones are not followed by enterprises when they plan, define, design, and deploy data integration solutions and technology.  Due to this a system misses out some very important facts and is not able to deliver the value that they would have otherwise been able to, at first place.

The good news for most enterprises is that data integration technology keeps improving, and has adapted with the infrastructural changes, including the use of cloud, big data, etc. Despite its flexibility, there still needs to be a certain amount of discipline and planning that should always be kept in mind.

DBSync provides Data integration solution for small and mid-sized businesses. Feel free to contact us to know more about our products and services. Visit us at preprod.mydbsync.com