What is data integration?

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Data integration refers to those processes linked to the movement and consolidation of information from various sources to facilitate its use and generate advanced analysis.

Data Integration: The First Step for a Data Driven Organization
Data integration is a fundamental asset for any company, as it is the first step to being able to use information intelligently and become a Data Driven organization.

Today, companies deal with hundreds or thousands of files and data coming from numerous sources. This makes it imperative to manage structured and unstructured data flows, and integration is the solution that consistently consolidates them and facilitates their use across all business applications and processes .

If we take into account that data integration refers to all the actions carried out in order to unify various sources of information and establish a common vision of a specific process, we can understand its great importance.

This is a fundamental requirement for storing australia phone number lead data, managing it and promoting Business Intelligence and Big Data administration, especially in a context where digital acceleration and technological evolution require a more modern and sophisticated architectural configuration.

Here are the most important points that demonstrate the importance of data integration in companies:

It drives the management, processing, comparison and enrichment of diverse data in order to generate advanced analysis.
Keeps data secure in compliance with regulations and in the requested format.
Reduce costs and complexity when managing applications and platforms.
Improves collaboration and encourages the democratization of information.
Allows you to create data lakes.
Unifies business systems, simplifying their management and administration.
It allows you to find patterns and links across sources to map data lineage.
It facilitates the migration of information or the unification of systems when mergers are carried out.
Prepares data for BI systems.
Thanks to these advantages and possibilities, companies can adapt their business culture to a 100% digitalized environment, taking advantage of data to improve their operations and make smart decisions that achieve business objectives.

The challenges of data integration
Carrying out data integration is not a simple task, especially when the data is still disintegrated from people, this being the main challenge that companies must overcome .

We must understand that the power of data is activated when it is integrated into a person

making a decision and taking action. In fact, Data Driven companies are those where data is connected to people naturally , as if it were another part of their organism.

Therefore, information integration must allow for the democratization of data so that all members of the organization can use it and make effective decisions.

Other challenges facing data integration include:

Complexity in the use of integration platforms
There are a large number of data integration platforms that are too complex (or code-oriented) and require experts or experienced collaborators to manage them.

This slows down analysis times, as many members of a company depend on these experts to visualize data and make valuable decisions.

High operating costs
The infrastructure required to begin storing and integrating data from diverse sources requires large capital and operational expenditures.

Faced with this, the cloud becomes the best solution to this problem that still persists in many companies.

Lack of a design that meets the company's requirements
Platforms are often used that do not meet the specific needs of the organization.

This happens because the functional and non-functional requirements of the company were not analyzed: number of users who will use the data, objectives and results of the integration, information security, etc.