Data is a game-changing asset for businesses that transforms from a burdensome distraction into a driving force for innovation and success. It empowers companies to improve customer experiences, streamline operations, and make smarter decisions that drive growth and strategic decision-making.
Unified storage minimizes hardware needs by combining separate storage platforms, such as network-attached storage (NAS) for file-based storage and disk arrays for block-based storage, into a single device. This reduces management and maintenance costs.
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Unified Data Management
The volume of data businesses must deal with is staggering. It’s not uncommon for companies to handle terabytes or more of information every day. And, if not managed properly, that could become a big problem. Unified data management minimizes that volume, ensuring that information is received, processed, stored, and only sent where needed. That helps to make the whole process less overwhelming and makes it far more realizable for businesses of all sizes.
Unified data management (UDM) is a practice that aims to coordinate diverse data management disciplines to create a more holistic, collaborative, and unified framework for managing information on an enterprise scale. It can also involve sharing and unifying technical infrastructure using data architecture components relevant to a company’s data management goals.
This isn’t just about unified storage capability, though that’s key. It’s about unlocking the true potential of your data by breaking down communication barriers and fostering a symphony of information. This helps to eliminate information silos, which can prevent data from reaching its full potential. It can also help save money by reducing the time and resources needed to manage data. Besides unified storage and access, UDM offers additional advantages like enhanced decision-making capabilities through improved predictive analytics and business forecasting.
Unified Data Access
Unified data access is critical to achieving business growth. With it, companies can extract and analyze valuable and actionable data, resulting in missed opportunities and stalled projects. Data-driven organizations that successfully unlock the total value of their data experience unprecedented growth rates.
Data is produced at a mind-boggling pace — 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, to be exact. And the vast majority of this data is unstructured. This massive amount of data presents two significant challenges for businesses:
First, organizations must manage this information in a consistent and centralized way. This requires unified data platforms, which are used for data integration and consolidation, data quality management, and more. The platform serves as a single source of truth, dismantling data silos and offering a consistent representation of the company’s data.
A unified data management platform allows businesses to deliver this information to applications and services through APIs and microservices. This includes everything from real-time analytics to historical data. This unified approach also ensures data is readable across all platforms.
Ultimately, unified data management helps businesses reduce costs by simplifying their complex data environments and making them more manageable. The platform enables users to access the data they need quickly and efficiently without going through the lengthy process of finding it, extracting it, and moving it between systems.
Unified Data Visualization
Providing business stakeholders with data visualization allows them to better focus on the essential components of their businesses. This could include analyzing reports or forming marketing strategies. Ultimately, these can increase profits because business owners work more efficiently and effectively.
Visualizing information also makes it easier to assimilate massive amounts of big data. This is because our brains process visual images up to 60,000 times faster than text or numbers.
For example, an environmental organization can create a visualization that compares air quality levels in various cities to illustrate how much pollution affects people’s health. Such a visualization can leave a lasting impression on the public and instigate them to take action.
A unified data platform is the best way to achieve this vision. Unified platforms can connect disparate systems and integrate them into one database through data virtualization. This creates a consolidated database that business users can access on any device.
Moreover, a unified data platform can eliminate data silos that keep information isolated within different systems. Often, these systems are operated by different departments and only leveraged by specific stakeholders. This can make it hard for company experts to understand a particular issue’s complete picture as they need to see the relevant information. However, a unified data analytics platform breaks down these barriers and makes accessing fresh, usable information accessible to all stakeholders.
Unified Data Analytics
With unified data, business leaders can gain actionable insights from diverse data sets to optimize their products and services. This enables them to drive customer satisfaction by developing a clear picture of the customer and tailoring their experiences to meet their needs.
A unified storage platform provides a single view of all aspects of the business so that the entire ecosystem can work together coherently. This enables consistency across all departments to help companies drive growth by streamlining administrative processes, increasing efficiency, and providing better service.
Unifying your business data will also help you to save time and money. Having a centralized repository for all your data will reduce the need to clean and process it multiple times, which can be expensive. This will also help you to develop more cost-effective analytics and AI projects, which will, in turn, accelerate your business growth.
The unified data analytics movement is driving businesses to make smarter decisions and maximize the value of their data. It will also allow them to address the most critical questions in their organizations—how they can maximize profits and improve their customers’ experience. Businesses need access to the most complete and accurate information to make these decisions. However, many companies struggle to integrate and analyze disparate data sources without a unified storage platform.
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