Preventing data cholesterol from storing too much data can lead to extreme consequences

What are you doing when the bell strikes at midnight on January 1, 2000? If you are managing your enterprise system then you may want to congratulate yourself on the timely upgrade of these systems before the deadline arrives, and I'm sure it's worth a drink. After all, you have effectively prevented your company's legacy applications from being exposed to a crisis that could result in the company not working properly on January 1, 2000.

Perhaps unknowingly, you are also the world ushered in the enterprise resource Planning (ERP) software of the Golden Age to provide a boost. In the the late 1990s, many enterprises launched a large-scale investment in ERP solution, from the side to avoid the old system encounter potential IYCC problems.

These initial ERP investments (albeit with a proven return on investment (ROI)) received a huge return on investment over the next 10-12 years. Therefore, if you implement the ERP project in the late 1990s, then you have successfully avoided the IYCC crisis, and continue to achieve sustainable advantages for the enterprise. But are you ready to meet the second wave of IYCC crisis?

Good things turn into bad things?

All of these huge ERP projects have laid the groundwork for another crisis that is now gradually emerging. After purchasing a new type of ERP system, companies began to transfer countless enterprise data to these systems, launching an unprecedented wave of data collection, and the wave has continued to date. Most companies now store data in large relational databases, and employees across the enterprise can access the data using standard systems.

Having accessible centralized enterprise data is an advantage. Data is the raw material for analysis. Analysis can facilitate strategic decision-making. Strategic decision-making can improve profits, enhance competitive advantage and improve efficiency.

But good things turn into bad things. After nearly 10 years of frantic data migration (moving data to the ERP system), it is now facing the effect that we can portray as "data cholesterol".

ERP crisis facing today: data cholesterol

Data cholesterol is a data effect that means that data accumulates over the entire production system and leads to stagnant running. This effect extends to a copy of the non production data, which in turn affects how all data is managed. Just as an excess of cholesterol in the human body can cause serious health problems, data cholesterol can hinder the business system from running properly, slowing down the response time of customer service requests and reporting queries directly. It will extend the test and reporting time. Extensive impact on everything you do in the IT world, forcing you to summon more employees to provide infrastructure support. And, this can make your business face a lot of unnecessary lawsuits.

To date, no leading enterprise software provider has provided customers with an easy way to archive data and purify data. Because they all focus on creating the integration library, that is, ensuring that users can easily enter data, these vendors never thought that it might not be desirable for users to permanently save the data. Given the complexity of the ERP data model and its referential integrity, it is difficult to extract data without causing any disruption.

That's why many companies today suffer from the pain of data cholesterol. Even mid-sized companies are now accumulating more than 1TB of data, and the volume of data continues to increase by 30% to 70% a year. The reasons why databases of this size are not ideal include the following (despite the fact that Moore's law is driving the price of hardware falling):

 The current legal and regulatory environment creates potential legal liability while the enterprise retains data for a long time (beyond legitimate demand). (Imagine the feeling of getting into a millions of dollar lawsuit.) ）

 In the context of the large amount of data, the difficulty of ensuring the continuous predictability of application performance is increasing. (Imagine a system outage, employee disruption, and customer loss.) ）

 While CPU and storage costs continue to fall, it is not easy to solve the problem by reserving some IT budgets and investing them in hardware. (think of the debate on the board.) ）

 While CIOs must reduce resource utilization and do more work, the human costs associated with managing the TB-level application environment are rising. (Do you want to ask the CFO for more money?) ）

 Production data proliferation in non-production systems (for development, testing, and training) has led companies to face data privacy legal responsibilities. (Think about the devastating public relations consequences.) ）

Many companies are turning to EDM

The painful combination of tight IT budgets, data cholesterol accumulation and regulatory requirements has prompted keen companies to start looking at how to manage their own data. This is why they apply the enterprise data Management (EDM) principles when implementing data governance. The EDM focuses on creating accurate, consistent, refined data content and integrating it into business applications. Today's EDM solutions focus on key issues such as data growth risk management, data privacy compliance, flexible test data management, electronic discovery, and application upgrades, migrations, and recycling, providing an effective way to avoid the dreaded adverse effects that data cholesterol can cause.

How does your company deal with data cholesterol benefits? Please tell us what you think in the comments.