Improving Data Accessibility with Internal Data Sharing

In today’s day and age, data is imperative to any organization, and yet it is often not as simple as one would hope. With the ever-rising volume and complexity of data, organizations face challenges in managing, analyzing, and utilizing data effectively. One of the key challenges that organizations face is effective data sharing within the enterprise. In this blog, we will discuss what data sharing is, its challenges, and how Astera can improve intra-enterprise data sharing. 

What is Data Sharing? 

 At the fundamental level, data sharing is the process of making a set of data resources available to individuals, departments, business units or even other organizations. It is an integral aspect of data management within an organization as it enables the stakeholders to access and utilize relevant data sets for analysis, decision making, and other purposes.    

Data sharing involve multiple forms, depending on the requirements and objectives of stakeholders. You can perform data sharing with direct file sharing, data feeds, APIs, or data warehouses.  

Why Data Sharing is Necessary? 

 According to Gartner, by 2023, organizations that rely on data sharing will outperform their counterparts in many business value metrics. Accessible data enables enterprises to enhance synergy between teams and departments to gain a better understanding of each other’s work, improve communication, and collaborate more efficiently towards a mutual goal.   

Data sharing also enables better, informed decisions by providing access to data collected by various business functions such as operations, customer success, marketing, etc. Moreover, data sharing leads to better data governance by centralizing their data and ensuring that it is consistent, accurate, and updated. This can help in minimizing data errors, enhance data security, and improve regulation compliance.   

while data sharing is crucial for organizations, it does not come without implementational challenge 

Create a Centralized Data Repository For Seamless Data Sharing with Astera Centerprise

View Demo

Challenges of Intra-Enterprise Data sharing 

Data Security:  

A primary challenge of sharing data across organizations is data security. When data is made available to everyone, the organization risks unauthorized access and data breaches. Private organizations might only want to authorize top management or specific departments to view sensitive data. For example, Human Resources is usually the only department that should have access to employee payroll data, meaning that information cannot be shared throughout the organization.  

Data Silos:  

Another major challenge in data sharing arises from data silos. Within an organization, different teams and departments can store their data in a system or application. For example, the marketing and finance team can collect data on the same customer and store it in different places. This creates data silos which threaten integration, sometimes resulting in duplication, inconsistencies, and inaccuracy.  

Incompatible Data Formats:  

Different teams and departments might be storing data in different structures and formats. This makes it difficult to integrate and consolidate data from various departments, resulting in issues with data quality and delays in data processing. For example, the finance department might be storing a customer’s information in xml file format, while the marketing department might be storing the same information in xlsx format.  

Manual Processes:  

Many organizations still use manual data sharing, which can be time-consuming, inefficient, and prone to error. it cannot effectively occur with tedious manual processes in place. 

How to Overcome the Challenges of Data Accessibility

A solution to address these challenges is to use a third-party data integration tool. There are numerous such tools available in the market that can help organizations stride towards a smooth data sharing process by creating a centralized data repository. These tools should be able to bring together data from different departments and data sources stored in various data silos, transform the data as per requirements, and integrate them to create a unified view of your data. Moreover, an ideal tool would allow you to perform all these tasks in a code-free environment and enable you to automate the whole process. 

Leverage Astera Centerprise to Improve Internal Data Accessibility

Astera Centerprise offers an end-to-end solution for improving your enterprise’s data sharing process. It empowers businesses to overcome the challenges of data sharing by offering the following four features: 

• A Centralized Data Repository:  

Astera enables organizations to bring data from disparate data sources and store it in a centralized location. This will allow each team and department to access the shared repository, eliminating data silos, ensuring data consistency, and improving collaboration. Moreover, it also leads to faster BI and informed data-driven decisions.  

• Data Quality Management:  

Data quality management is the process of ensuring reliable data for analytics and BI by identifying and eliminating inconsistencies and errors. Astera enables businesses to ensure data quality at every step of the data sharing process for accurate, consistent, and updated data. This enables enterprises to extract reliable business insights. 

• Simplified Data integration: 

Astera is a completely code-free data integration platform that operates in a drag & drop environment. This makes it easier than ever to bring the data from multiple sources, apply data transformations and data quality rules, and map into the centralized data repository, without writing a single line of code. 

• Workflow Automation: 

Data sharing is an ongoing process, requiring continuous updates to the data repository. With Astera’s workflow automation feature, you can automate your data integration pipeline to run on a schedule. It would save manual effort of running the dataflow every time to get updated data. Moreover, this will enable near-real-time data sharing, leading to faster decision-making and stronger BI architecture. 

Experience Connectivity to a Wide Range of Data Sources & Platforms to Integrate your Data Easily

See How It's Done

Astera has a long history of helping organizations optimize their data sharing capabilities. For example, Cherry Health, a large healthcare organization, uses Centerprise to better serve their patients through data-driven analytics. By using automated ETL jobs, they achieve faster data movement from their EHR systems, clinical applications, and medical devices, into a data warehouse for reporting & BI. 

Similarly, a Union League Cub of Chicago (ULCC), leverages Astera Centerprise for ETL and data synchronization to automate data movement among its information systems. As a result, ULCC was able to achieve a 70% reduction in the time spent creating synchronized database tables across their main systems.  

Astera Centerprise for Seamless Internal Data Sharing

Make all your data accessible to each team & department within your organization by building a centralized data repository. Leverage the powerful ETL engine of Astera Centerprise to fast-track & automate your data integration processes, so that your teams can focus only on extracting useful insights and take data-driven decisions. 

Download Astera Centerprise 14-day free trial today, for a seamless data sharing experience.