Here’s Why You Should Consider Enterprise Data Warehouses
Data is the key asset for any organization. It impacts every business regardless of its domain and size.
Organizations often get data from varying sources. This could be structured, semi-structured, or even unstructured data, like audios or videos.
With optimized and result-driven data collection and analysis, organizations can better understand what their customers want, how much they like the product they bought, how frequently they buy such products, how their organizations stand within markets as compared to other competitors, and more. These are a few of the many questions that can be answered if we keep clean and analysis-driven data in place.
The enormous amount of data and information collected constantly is the biggest nightmare for any organization. Figuring out how to collect, store, process, and safeguard this information to use it in a fluid way is a tough task unless you know how to build enterprise data warehouses. Yes, a data warehouse is a clean, structured representation of your data. It is also commonly referred to as a single source of truth.
That being said, let’s first understand what an enterprise data warehouse is?
What is an Enterprise Data Warehouse?
An enterprise data warehouse is a common system built for data reporting and analysis. It is a clean, organised, single representation of the data. Enterprise data warehouses often store data from multiple source systems in a structured way to perform analysis and extract meaningful information.
Having all the data in a single place helps multiple stakeholders such as managers and business analysts perform reporting and analysis work. They can have a holistic view of all the data in a single place. Often analysts run ad-hoc queries on data warehouses to get meaningful insights.
Nowadays, cloud data warehouse systems are gaining more popularity due to their MPP architecture, pay-as-you-use feature, high scalability, and low price. Building an enterprise data warehouse on the cloud can do wonders with business intelligence and help organizations get better insights.
Reasons Your Business Needs an Enterprise Data Warehouse
The data stored in enterprise data warehouses is one of the key assets for any organization. Without an enterprise data warehouse in place, different departments within the organization might be working in data silos. They all would have different snapshots of the same data and often feel confusion when collaborating with different departments for any business use case.
The benefits of an enterprise data warehouse are not just limited to reporting and analysis. There are a few more ways you benefit from having an enterprise data warehouse.
Trusted Source Of Truth
Enterprise data warehouses are built with constant discussions with business stakeholders. They store all of the data in a single place after cleaning and processing as per business requirements. Everyone uses the single source of truth across departments to do reporting and analysis, thus eliminating discrepancies in data.
Standardised Data
Enterprise data warehouses are unique in the sense that they store data from multiple systems within an organization. With an efficient enterprise data warehouse having accurate transformations in place, stakeholders can greatly rely on this data and need not aggregate or convert the data.
For example, your one source system might interpret male as ‘0’ and female as ‘1’. On the other hand, another system might denote male as ‘M’ and female as ‘F’. Keeping one standard system in your enterprise data warehouse means ‘M’ will be male and ‘F’ will be female. Thus, there will be a standardised sense of information.
Faster And Easier
Enterprise data warehouses are built with the idea that they should be easier to use and respond faster to queries. Enterprise data warehouses are built using dimensional modelling concepts, which highly recommends denormalising tables instead of normalising them when building OLTP systems.
Making data available in denormalised form makes it easier for end users to understand the relationships between tables. Moreover, having fewer joins accelerates query performance.
Cross Department Collaboration
Enterprise data warehouses give a holistic view of your data. For instance, the retail business marketing team might want to track ads and campaigns or visitors coming to a website, and the sales team might want to track what products were purchased when there was a campaign. The bigger challenge comes when we need to combine data from two teams.
If we have an enterprise data warehouse as a single source of truth, both teams can leverage the shared data and understand the customer journey easily and accurately.
Disaster Recovery
Cloud data warehouses come with enhanced security and built-in disaster recovery plans since almost all vendors offer managed cloud data warehouses. These systems automatically replicate the data on different zones/regions for fault tolerance and recovery, which eliminates the risk of data loss. These systems can also scale up or down as and when need arises.
Conclusion
The true business benefit of having an enterprise data warehouse is that it allows organizations to analyse their data effectively and in a trustworthy way. It helps organizations level up in every aspect. It is built to answer many complex business questions. It creates accuracy and denormalised data and gives a holistic view in a central place so that more than just the purely technical team can leverage it and make decisions. Advance reporting and analytics capabilities of modern cloud data warehouses can help improve your organizations key business decisions.
I hope this article helped you decide why you need an enterprise data warehouse. Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks for reading!
