What is a data warehouse and do you need one?
Making business decisions based on spreadsheets or siloed databases leads to inconsistencies in your data. Throughout this piece, we will define what a data warehouse is and why you might need one to optimise operations within your company.
A data warehouse is a repository of data that is extracted, transformed and loaded from one or more operational source systems to enable data analysis and reporting. An enterprise data warehouse provides a central location for decision-making for the entire business. These systems are developed to work with big data, allowing the user to visualise and analyse the information simultaneously and without having to consolidate results from different data sources.
The architecture of these systems:
Lower level
The server where the data is loaded and stored.
Intermediate level
Contains the analysis engine used to access the data
Upper level
The front-end client that presents the results of the analysis using data visualisation tools.
Some Benefits to Having a Data Warehouse
Improved Business Intelligence
Integrating multiple source systems means you can make decisions based on all of your data.
Timely Access to Data
When data is housed in one, centralised location you have quick, timely access to critical data.
Better Data Quality and Consistency
With a data warehouse, data throughout the organisation is standardised and stored in the same format. This means all departments can make decisions based on uniform data, eliminating inconsistencies in reporting.
Historical Intelligence
Data warehouses stores large amounts of historical data which means you can identify trends over time.
Data Mining
Explore “big data” to predict future trends.
Fast Query Response Times
Most data warehouses are built for read access, meaning fast reporting generation.
Security
Data warehouses make provisioning easy by giving access to specific data to qualified end-users and restricting others.
Auditing
Data stored in a data warehouse provides a complete picture of exactly when data was loaded and from which source(s).
It is worth taking a closer look at how information is stored and shared across your company. If you have inconsistencies in your data and reporting, issues with sharing data and multiple data sources, a data warehouse might be the business solution for you.
Do You Have a Single Source of the Truth?
Trying to deduce accurate insights from data that is stored and formatted differently across data siloes can result in major discrepancies and inconsistencies across departments. Data warehouses improve data quality and provide a single source of the truth across every department in the company. This ensures each department is using and reporting on the same data. Check out POLR xConnect for more information about single source of the truth.
Intov8's Data Warehousing Services
Whether you store data in spreadsheets or various operational systems, Intov8 can help you get the most out of your data, transforming it into consistent information across your company to make more informed decisions. Contact the team to see how we can implement a data warehousing solution for you.
