Going Beyond Traditional Data Integration to Achieve Business Agility

Providing business users with the data they need to make effective decisions has always been difficult. Increasing data volumes, varieties of data and heterogeneous data stores are not making this task any easier. For the past two decades, the solution to accessing disparate data has been to consolidate the data into a data warehouse, and provide users with tools to access and analyze this consolidated data.

However, growing demand to access data not managed by the data warehouse, coupled with the need to access current data for more agile decision making, means organizations have to change the way data is accessed and used by business users. The solution is to give users a single interface to the data and data services they need, regardless of where the data is stored or how it is organized. This doesn’t mean organizations have to abandon the data warehouse, but rather they need to extend it. Data virtualization is a set of techniques and technologies that provide the key underpinnings that enable organizations to do this.