Data is the crux of any enterprise, and all enterprises depend on data for their futuristic decisions and business workflows. Be it implementing cutting-edge technologies or taking relevant business decisions or extracting insightful information in the form of dashboards and reports – data is the heart and soul of an enterprise.

As the spread of data increases across enterprises, it is seen that its consumption, interpretation, and expression also increase far and wide. It could be expressed in different formats – structured, semi-structured, and unstructured. Various data-related technologies are in vogue now – data warehousing, data lakes, and data engineering. One such modernized way of centralizing data is an Enterprise Data Hub.

There is a frequent comparison between all these data-related technologies but each one holds its significance. An Enterprise Data Hub is a centralized repository that holds multiple data components together and ensures that there is a unified source of information that is trusted, accurate, enriched, and most recent.

This article throws light on this cutting-edge concept of an Enterprise Data Hub, its importance, salient features, and how it benefits the enterprise world, in a big way.

What is an Enterprise Data Hub?

An Enterprise Data Hub is an integrated and centralized data solution that implements multiple data-related processes simultaneously, keeping in light, the business needs, organizational objective, and amount of data that is being unified. It clubs together data warehousing, data science, data engineering, data analytics, and more. It also helps in growing, connecting, and protecting businesses.

It acts more like a strategy that decides which type of data process is needed, when, and how is it to be implemented. It is the end users – could be software applications, people, algorithms, or processes, that interact with the Data Hub to either extract data or offer data in the needed pattern. The data hub assists organizations in effectively managing and governing data that is related to ongoing business processes.

It is more like a centralized amalgamation of a data lake and a data warehouse that offers a view of how data is traveling across the business units, almost in real-time. One of the key strengths of leveraging an Enterprise Data Hub is the flexibility it offers in using different data sources and the support that it gives in fast data growth. It supports a huge variety of analytical and operational use cases vide multiple industry segments.

Organizations must go in for a data-centric approach towards data integration. It begins with an assessment of different inventory elements in the organization and then finding out various data sources along with their relationship with each other. Then comes setting priority for data elements for extracting the exact integration pointers. This reduces the data silos and comes up with an organized and stable environment that offers excellent business value.

Key critical success factors for an Enterprise Data Hub are

• Revenue growth
• Innovative techniques
• Less total cost of ownership
• Accurate and insightful business outcome
• Enhanced efficacy levels

Why is an Enterprise Data Hub Required?

Whenever organizations undergo data integration, there are many challenges involved. Since there are different systems, there are different data formats. Extracting and receiving data from these data sources is a tough task. The infrastructure involved with all these data sources may be different and can be leveraged in different ways.

Even the quality of data may vary with certain accurate results or with certain discrepancies like duplicity, outdated information, etc. Hence, when it is a matter of such varied categories of data, there is a need for a centralized data source and storage that can bring in consistency and security.

The need for an Enterprise Data Hub arises when there is a need for streamlined data management, data consistency, and availability of social information. The entire chunk of business information must be centralized to access data in whatever way it is needed. This can bring along a lot of benefits for the organizations.

What are the Salient Features of Enterprise Data Hub?

To overcome the above challenges, an Enterprise Data Hub must have the following significant features:

• Utilization of search engines for managing enterprise-level data
• Indexing of data for quicker data search
• Harmonizing data for better data quality and relevance
• Ensuring data integrity by lessening errors, duplicity, malicious intents
• Consolidation of disparate data from various sources in different formats
• Identifying relationships between data elements through analytics
• Enhanced implementation of modern technologies like AI, ML, etc.
• Pre-designed integration with other tools and technologies
• Configuration-based data validation procedures
• Flexible data models that can suit your requirements
• Smooth and accurate data flow and data management
• Easy collaboration, sharing of ideas, and innovation
• Augmented levels of data security
• Increased data visibility and faster data delivery
• Real-time and data-driven insights
• Accessible resources with stringent storage

Why Do Enterprise Data Hubs Projects Fail?

Not all Enterprise Data Hubs projects succeed, some see a failure despite best efforts, and certain key reasons are attached to it:

• Lack of integration across different systems
• Missing business objective
• Lacking elements of data quality, metrics, etc.
• Not sufficient responsiveness to emerging trends
• Stern business processes and missing agility to match

Till Later

With data becoming the heart of organizations, business intelligence, and Big Data are the new normal. Enterprise Data Hubs are becoming an essential ingredient for creating a consolidated view for enhanced business processes across the enterprise. Since the entire source of data is now centralized, there are fewer chances of malicious intent, late delivery schedules, manual operations, etc.

Enterprise Data Hubs can bring in more collaboration between teams, offer real-time information updates, increase the security level, and automate processes to get better decision-making, thereby, upsurging the competitive spirit and staying a step ahead of the rest.

Ridgeant is a trusted service provider for extensive data warehousing, data engineering, and data analytics services. We can help you overcome your data challenges and offer customizable data-driven solutions that can operate seamlessly in the cloud, on-premises, or go by the hybrid model.

Our data warehouse services include consultation, implementation, migration, and managed services to help organizations consolidate data in efficient DWH solutions. Our data analytics consulting enables you to unlock actionable insights and evolve into a data-driven organization to optimize performance and increase growth. We use various tools and technologies for data engineering processes to deliver solutions that streamline data across your organization.

Reach out to us for any kind of data-related requirements and our experienced team will come up with an ideal solution for your ideas!