As data is the biggest asset for any business house and it wants to get the most out of it. Data is coming from various sources and it is very difficult to manage the growing volumes of structured and unstructured data. Various database management systems have their own ways to deal with it. Also, organizations require business intelligence, analysis and reporting. The task is not a piece of cake.
For making business decisions, data is required in a uniform manner. The volume of data has been growing, especially since the arrival of the concept of big data, like:
- Structured and unstructured data must be unified and for that, business houses need trained analysts.
- Different databases must be compatible with each other.
- Companies must store large amount of data due to data-retention regulations.
Data virtualization tool seems to be the solution because it removes data from applications and places the data in the memory. It also provides a combined view of data from different sources in a format that business users want. Big organizations have been working on this line. It reduces the dependency on database management systems but, all this is not easy.
Data virtualization tools maps the actual data to the actual location. It also provides a unified view of the data collected from different sources. Various organizations are offering powerful data virtualization tools to do the job. Data virtualization permits an application to retrieve and manipulate data without looking for the technical details about the data like formatting or its physical location. It can provide a single customer view of the overall data.
Big industries say that the rise of data virtualization may diminish the importance of the process of extracting data from source systems and bringing it into the data warehouse. Data virtualization provides unified and real-time display of data. However, it is changing the information services platform strategy.
Big organizations has the following benefits:
- The tool would store a view of the data in cache, so that the speed of data integration request fulfillment increases.
- The user can view of the data stored in the memory in case of a server crash.
- The data virtualization platform supported multiple different data sources like cloud-based CRM systems and business intelligence tools.
- As the data is stored in the memory, the platform could display unified views of the data customized to the users preferences.
Conclusion:
It can be taken for sure that data virtualization is becoming popular. However, proper planning is required to create unified and customized views from several different data sources for different customers is an extremely difficult task technically. This trend is expected to last.