Data Management: Importance And Challenges

Nowadays, most of the things that we encounter are digital. Which means there is a lot of data floating around. This data is the building block for intelligence which is vital in making important business decisions. Companies have to ensure that their employees have access to top-class data to facilitate their decision making, so they end up investing in data management services that improve the security, scalability, visibility and reliability of this data.

What is data management?
The collection, protection, organisation and storing of the data of an organisation with a purpose to be analyzed for better decision making is called data management. While operating a business creates and consumes data robustly, so it is important to have a data management solution in place to derive insights out of the huge pile of data. Today’s top data management software can ensure businesses have the up-to-date data to drive vital business decisions. These software solutions help businesses with a vast array of data services such as search, cataloguing and governance, allowing the staff to get access to the right information quickly.

Types of Data Management
Data management is the main pillar of an organization’s data ecosystem, which helps in making important functions easier in the shortest time possible. Below mentioned are some data management techniques:

Data Preparation: This technique is used to clean and alter the raw data into the right format so that it can be easily analyzed. It also includes making corrections and combining data sets.

Data Pipelines: Like the name suggests it is the automated transfer of data seamlessly from one system to another.

ETLs (Extract, Transform, Load): These are passages that are developed to transfer the data from one system to another, then transform it and eventually upload it into the organization’s data warehouse.

Data Catalogs: These data catalogues help the organization manage metadata with results in visualising the whole picture of data. It provides a summary of all the changes, quality and location of data so that it can be easily accessed.

Data Warehouses: The name gives out what this technique is. Yes, it’s a place where data is accumulated from various sources. It gives you an overview of the kind of data stored. It provides a clear route aiding the organization for efficient data analysis.

Data Governance: This technique is where we standardise, define processes and policies to maintain data integrity and security.

Data Architecture: It is the creation of a formal approach for effectively treating and managing data flow.

Data Security: It is the measures taken to protect the data from breaches, unauthorized access and fraud.

Data Modeling: It is the method of documenting the flow of data through an organization or an application.

Why is data management important?
Data management is an important part of data analysis at scale whose outcome is the derivation of important insights that improve your business bottom line and add value to your customers. With an effective data management system, your employees can have access to valuable and trusted data for their queries. Some of the benefits of effective data management are mentioned below:

Visibility
Data management elevates the whole visibility of your organization’s data sets, making it a lot easier for your employees to confidently and quickly find the right data. It also allows your organization to be productive and effective, allowing your employees to do a better job.

Reliability
Data management helps organizations minimize the potential risk of errors by creating processes and policies. This also helps in the data being more trustworthy and can be used freely across the organization. With trusted and, sorted data companies can respond quickly to disruption in the market and ever-changing customer needs.

Security
Data management keeps your organization safe from thefts, data losses and security breaches by implementing encryption tools and authentication. A strong data security system saves the company’s data by creating a backup and a retrieval process in case the primary source becomes unavailable. Security is also important as there are times when data contains sensitive information which needs to be managed properly and comply with consumer protection laws.

Scalability
Data management helps organizations to scale effectively and use repetitive processes to keep the data and metadata updated. When the process is easy to repeat then the organization can negate the excess cost of duplication, like employees repeatedly running costly queries or conducting the same type of research over and over again.

Data management Challenges
Data management is critical to businesses today, so it is important to evolve it to meet your organization’s data needs. In the old data management process, it was difficult to scale up without compromising the security or governance of data. However, modern data management processes should address the following challenges:

Challenge 1: Increased data volumes
An organization comprises various departments with their specific need for data and the value that is derived from it. Earlier the IT team used to prepare the data needed and then maintain the files or database. Today we deal with vast amounts of data, which could catch the organization off guard as they could easily become unaware of the data they have been collecting, where and how to use that data.

Challenge 2: New roles for analytics
As time passes organizations collect more and more data to make data-driven decisions. This means you ask more and more people to access and analyze data. Not everyone working with data has the skill set to understand the nomenclature, complicated data structures and databases. It can come up as a new challenge. It takes a lot of effort or time to convert, analyse data then the potential value starts diminishing.

Challenge 3: Compliance requirements
Constant changes in compliance requirements can be challenging to ensure that your employees are using the right data. An organization and its employees need to quickly understand which data to be used and which shouldn’t, including the factors that are recorded, tracked and monitored with respect to personally identifiable information (PII) in regard to compliance and privacy regulations.

Find an effective data management platform
An effective data management solution would help your organization to achieve all of the above best practices. The Unthinkable approach to data management is unique from traditional solutions. With the Unthinkable Data Management services, you get a solution that’s designed with multiple people in mind. It also remains heavily focused on analytics so people get the information they need when and where they need it—directly in the flow of their analysis. If you are interested in Data Management Services, please do book a Free, no-obligation consultation with our experts, today!