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5 Reasons You Need a Data Consolidation Software
Every business gathers a vast amount of data from various sources like databases, files, and other applications. This data serves as the raw material that fuels the transformation and growth of your business.
However, this is only possible if you properly unify all your data through a process called data consolidation. In this article, we’ll explain how a consolidation software helps you combine enterprise data from disparate sources and extract value from it. Plus, we’ll look at some key features that a consolidation software must have to drive performance.
What is a Data Consolidation Software?
A data consolidation software enables you to integrate data from disparate sources and create a 360-degree view. Every source system stores data in a specific format. A data consolidation software facilitates integration by standardizing data formats, reducing redundancies, and cleaning up errors. This allows data to become compatible with the target location, such as a database or data warehouse.
Why Do You Need A Data Consolidation Software?
Here are some reasons why you need data consolidation software for your business:
1. Handle Complex, High-Volume Data
Manually joining a huge amount of data takes a lot of time and is inefficient. This is because human intervention can make it prone to errors. Built-in connectors and transformations in consolidation software reduce the chances of errors and data quality issues during the data integration process.
2. Connect Isolated Parts of An Organization
Centralizing your data allows you to collaborate and share information with different departments and teams throughout the enterprise. It helps streamline data processes so that all business units are on the same page.
3. Expedite Reporting Process
A consolidation software ensures greater data quality and accuracy and makes it easier to access, manipulate, and analyze data. As a result, you get trusted data that can expedite reporting and business intelligence and consequently improve decision-making.
4. Improve Data Security
Consolidating your data in a single cloud-based location makes it easier for you to secure your assets. This is because now you must manage and protect just a single repository instead of multiple sources. Moreover, updating a unified system with data, instead of numerous obsolete legacy systems, ensures lesser security risks and better threat management.
5. Offers Better Control
When all your critical business data is stored in a centralized location, you can easily determine which data is essential and which can be removed for better storage management and scalability.
Features to Look for in a Data Consolidation Software
When choosing data consolidation software for your business, look for the following features:
· Integration
The consolidation software you choose should support integration with other enterprise systems, such as your CRM, ERP, and other applications, so that you can easily import data from these sources.
· Scalability
Your data volume and needs will become complex as your business expands over time. The software should have the ability to scale with your organization’s growing data needs. Features like pushdown optimization and parallel processing are a plus, as they ensure high performance even if the volume increases.
· Data Validation
Data validation enables you to profile your source data, identify inconsistencies, and fix them before loading them into the destination repository. This ensures that the consolidated data is accurate and free of errors.
· Automation
Automation can dramatically reduce the time you spend on unifying data. You can easily schedule transformation and integration jobs based on triggers and simplify the process of identifying and fixing errors.
· Robust Reporting
Consolidation software should provide robust reporting facilities to analyze and generate comprehensive reports in real-time.
· Cost-Effective
The primary purpose of using data consolidation software is to make the process efficient and cost-effective. Therefore, choosing a tool that provides cutting-edge features like smart mapping, visual UI, etc., within your company’s budget is essential.
data in a code-free UI
Wrap Up
Using the right consolidation software allows you to extract data easily from source systems and check data quality and consistency simultaneously. As a result, you get reliable data in a single location that can be fed into user-facing applications.
Astera Centerprise is a robust data integration solution offering all the features you need to kick-start your data consolidation project. It allows you to collect data from disparate sources and create a unified view of your company’s information assets – all with ZERO coding.
Authors:
Tehreem Naeem
