For anyone who is involved within the IT, or data management, of a particular company it is important for them to stay up to date with what the future integration processes can be. The reason is that many companies are still relying on antiquated data management, as well as business processes, that leave a major hurdle for competing in the marketplace.
Newer data management, most notably the integration of cloud computing into an SOA framework, can drastically reduce operational costs and increase production and customer satisfaction. The advances in data integration can be best understood when you consider the differences between solving data integration problems using custom programming code versus leveraging data integration technology.
In the distant past, data integration meant code generators and rudimentary ETL. With the widespread use of cloud computing today, data integration can be real time data exchange, sophisticated management capabilities, data governance, error handling, semantic mediation and many other features. These useful features go a long way towards making data integration much more turn-key and able to deliver quick business value.
Data technology today has made tremendous leaps into the future with current technologies. Any company that uses this type of integration into their continued look ahead will be rewarded with tremendous benefits through real time real-time integration functionality, as well as data cleansing and data profiling tools.
Another added feature is that the cloud integration not only sets your business up for future real-time integration of new tools, but also lower operational costs in training and upkeep. These new technologies are no longer intensive in how they are used.
However, one can not underestimate the the return on investment that is increased as these new features are realized. Integration typically sees a payback time for an investment in data integration technology in only a few months. This type of turnaround on investment, as well as increased productivity, leads to strategic cost savings, such as maintaining good integration links with customer and partners, and the ROI for data integration skyrockets.
Following on the heels of data integration and the use of the new technologies out there is the implementation of this new technology. Of course, the easiest is to combine both the SOA framework of your current structure and include the cloud. The rise of the cloud has led to a rethinking of data integration. There is a current trend of more and more use of date being stored in public clouds. However, there is a need to sync that data back into the enterprise. This movement to the cloud does not just create another silo of data, but the data is kept consistent between those systems and databases that reside in the local data center, or they may exist within public clouds.
The main idea in all of this is to simply look forward in your IT, your data management, and your overall business processes. Not only for the bottom line, but also for your enterprise as a whole consisting of employees and customers.