3 Reasons Enterprises Can’t Afford to Ignore Data Integration Any Longer

Enterprises today need real-time insights to make informed business decisions and maintain a competitive edge. Your stakeholders don’t have time to wait for access to data for days or weeks, only for it to be stale. But with hundreds or even thousands of applications, your data is trapped in silos without a way to easily feed your analytics.

On top of that, your central IT team likely receives a high volume of data access requests from within the organization, which creates a backlog of isolated projects.

So, how can you centralize your data, provide needed insights and free up time for your central IT team? The answer lies in incorporating an effective data integration solution into your processes. Data integration connects fragmented, siloed data residing in different systems, standardizes it and brings it into a central place. This enables you to run analysis, unearth competitive insights and build a single view of the customer.

Here are three reasons enterprises need to focus on data integration for analytics, now more than ever:

1. To prepare your data across applications for analytics

Enterprises run on a unique set of applications that act as sources for different data types and formats. With a comprehensive data integration solution, you will be able to connect to your source, access your data, run an extract, transform, load (ETL) pipeline and load the transformed data into your cloud data warehouse. The ETL process helps standardize your data, whether it’s structured or unstructured at the source.

A no-code data integration solution like this helps reduce dependency on central IT by empowering tech-savvy business users, including data analysts, analytics engineers, data scientists and business-focused data engineers. This gives them the ability to focus on the applications containing the most pertinent data, instead of central IT needing to tackle integrating all company data at once. 

2. To free up resources and accelerate innovation

Innovation relies on having the most relevant insights plus the resources to devote to trying out new ideas. As it stands, your IT team needs to split their time between taking data requests, maintaining myriads of existing data pipelines and fulfilling their other core responsibilities.

An effective data integration solution will provide high-speed data loading from your data sources to your cloud data warehouse, so you can accelerate the data migration process. And it will enable you to automate some of the tasks involved. Plus, you can look for a tool that offers reusable mappings and templates.

This frees up time for your IT team to focus on other priorities that drive business value. And it enables your users to get insights to put into immediate action and spark innovation. 

3. To enable data democratization organization-wide

Effective data integration will help you empower users within departments across your organization with self-serve access to data. And a no-code data integration solution also gives departmental teams like sales and marketing operations the ability to build their own data pipelines. By enabling your marketing, sales, finance and other teams to access real-time data pertinent to their areas, you are making it easier and faster for them to get the information they need to be more productive and impactful at their jobs.

Collecting meaningful data from a vast array of sources, whether they’re on-premises, in one cloud or in multiple clouds, can pose a big challenge to data analysis. You need to consolidate, modify and filter all the data you collect when running an analysis. Informatica Cloud Data Integration-Free (CDI-Free) and Cloud Data Integration-PayGo (CDI-PayGo) simplify data integration. That way, you can focus less on data administration and more on solving complex business challenges.

Learn more about getting started with CDI-Free and discover additional resources at www.informatica.com/free-paygo.