Modern businesses rely on increasing amounts of data to design, market, and manufacture products, streamline their operations, increase revenues and manage inventory in order to cut costs. This data should be readily accessible to all employees, and it must be accurate, reliable and secure.
To satisfy these requirements, companies require a complete solution that has the tools and technologies necessary to oversee every step of the lifecycle of data: collecting, storing and processing. A comprehensive data solution should include data governance, business analytics, and a data catalogue.
When it’s time to collect and store data, an organization needs to ensure that it has the capacity to scale up or down to meet the demands. It is crucial to select the right database to store data and to have the tools necessary to move data into and out of that database. It is also essential to find and eliminate unnecessary siloed information to reduce the size of the operational databases.
Data infrastructure is the term used to describe the tools used to collect and store data. It is a set of software used for managing, storing and processing data for analysis and reporting. This layer also includes systems that create visual representations of data to allow them to be more easily used by analytics and business intelligence tools. This layer is divided into two parts, namely data modeling and datawarehouse management.