Through the years, many organizations have built up massive amounts of enterprise data. Unfortunately, all this data is dispersed over many systems all using different technologies. This dispersion has several disadvantages. First, it has a negative impact on the quality of data. Second, it’s hard for business users to get an integrated view of all the data. To the users, it feels as if enterprise data is deeply buried underneath a mountain of poorly integrated IT systems— as if it has been hidden in a data labyrinth.

More and more new IT systems need to retrieve and manipulate data stored in multiple systems. For many of these systems a dedicated integration solution has been developed. All these integration efforts have resulted in data integration silos. This is a highly undesirable situation, because eventually this approach leads to a data integration labyrinth. Data from a particular system is integrated with other data using different technologies and solutions. Due to this data integration labyrinth, data is buried deeply, and is therefore hard to exploit and diminishes the value of data to the business.

Enterprise data is buried deeply in the data integration labyrinth and is therefore hard to exploit and diminishes its business value.

What is urgently needed is a solution that centralizes and standardizes much of the data integration work: a data integration platform. Data virtualization is a technology for integrating and transforming data coming from all kinds of data sources and presenting all that data as one unified view. When data virtualization is applied, an abstraction and encapsulation layer is provided that, for applications, hides most of the technical aspects of how and where data is stored. Because of that layer, applications don’t need to know where all the data is physically stored, where it’s coming from, how the data should be integrated, where the database servers run, how to insert and update the data, what the required APIs are, which database language to use, and so on. When data virtualization is deployed, to every application it feels as if one large database is accessed.

Interested? Ask for the whitepaper “Creating an Agile Data Integration Platform using Data Virtualization” Quant ICT Group, glenda@quant-ict.nl, tel: +31 88-0882500

Source: Rick F. van der Lans, Independent Business Intelligence Analyst