5 Factors Affecting Data Integration and Management

Today’s most successful companies view data as the new business currency and use it to generate insights, drive innovation, and disrupt industry development. Enterprise IT leaders play a vital role in this process by ensuring consistent access to high-quality data. In order to accomplish this mission, IT professionals must develop effective strategies to integrate and manage the ever-expanding data stream from a wider range of sources, and coordinate these data into information that provides value to the enterprise and its customers. As the amount of data and the number of data sources increase, the question of how to integrate and manage its information assets becomes more important.



As data integration and management technologies continue to evolve, determining the best data strategy is challenging for companies. As IT leaders consider new solutions that support their data integration and management goals, they must consider major shifts in the market, including technological advancements, platform changes, and new business models deployed by solution providers. Understanding the following five factors can help IT professionals make the right decisions.



(1) Delete the data domain boundary



The enterprise integration and data management environment includes solutions for various integration modes: A2A, B2B/EDI, ETL, MFT, and a combination of internal deployment and cloud integration. The data has been divided into domains according to the integration mode. Due to the advancement of integration technology, multiple integration modes and requirements can now be solved more effectively through a single platform, thereby simplifying the complexity of integration and data management. This development makes single domain solutions obsolete.



(2) The legacy integration technology is destroyed



As IT leaders seek technologies that support digital transformation and seek ways to integrate and manage data in various formats from various sources, they are shifting from target and on-premise solutions to the cloud. The aging B2B/EDI, MFT and middleware solutions are too fragile and inflexible to handle modern data integration and management. These solutions place data in silos, making it difficult for companies to extract and share information to improve efficiency, and to launch new digital-based business models that meet changing customer needs faster. Digital transformation requires flexible and scalable integration and data management technologies. The local server solution designed more than ten years ago was simply unable to complete the task. By choosing the right cloud-based solutions, IT leaders can support more dynamic digital operations that can deploy data and connect ecosystems, thereby creating more customer value for the enterprise.



(3) Focus on data management



Understandably, companies and suppliers have been focusing on data integration in the past few years, seeking ways to modernize integration solutions and methods to adapt to today's more complex environments. As companies face large amounts of data from many different sources and different types of data (including structured and unstructured data), they also turn more attention to data management. They recognize the strategic importance of obtaining reliable and consistent data, and achieving this goal requires careful data cleaning, transformation, and coordination. Therefore, data-driven organizations are focusing on data management strategies and solutions.



(4) Professional integration and data management service market growth



Data integration and data management are more challenging today, which drives the demand for professional skills of employees. IT leaders who are responding to this new reality need to make choices: they can devote more internal resources to integrator projects that require internal IT staff to use tools to create workarounds and force data scientists to spend most of their time as "Data stewards", or they can seek data integration and management expertise outside the organization. In the latter case, the solution provider treats data cleansing and integration as managed services, while internal IT professionals use the generated high-quality data to generate insights, inspire innovation, and support digital transformation.



(5) Increase in data security and data privacy regulations



High-profile hacking incidents and data security and data privacy issues are driving regulatory entities to adopt new regulatory requirements and higher standards. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) issued by the European Union is an example. Meeting all of these standards is a challenge for IT leaders who must ensure compliance, and as regulators require more oversight of platforms, processes, and people to protect sensitive data and ensure privacy, the challenges may increase. As regulations become stricter, more and more IT leaders need to work with platform providers to ensure full compliance with multiple corporate data regulatory frameworks. Doing so helps reduce the compliance burden on internal teams.



A broader trend in the data integration and management space is that the two disciplines of "data integration" and "data management" are converging to form a unified "data platform" market. This development will simplify the choice of IT professionals by providing total solutions. The right combination of data platform and managed services can effectively solve today's integration and data management challenges.



The use of professional management services for integration and data management is a continuation of another trend that has existed in the technology field for many years: companies focus on professional knowledge and rely on cloud computing partners to support any critical business. Just as companies now find it easier to access infrastructure from partners instead of building and maintaining internal functions, IT leaders are looking for data integration and management experts to provide platforms and services that consistently generate high-quality data.



As data integration and management solutions become more effective and more companies choose to transfer related processes and privacy and security compliance to third parties, business leaders can devote more resources to digital transformation. Companies that take advantage of these opportunities will be more conducive to using technology, which is not only a digital support for traditional operating processes, but also changes the way they conduct business and provides value to customers. This situation means that the development of data integration and management technology will enable companies to focus on a data-inspired future.