How to get the most out of data?

Data management (data management) is the process of ingesting, storing, organizing and maintaining data created and collected by a company. Effective data management is crucial in deploying IT systems that run business applications and provide advanced data analytics information to help drive operational decision-making and strategy by decision makers decision, commercial managers and other end users.

The data engineering process includes a combination of different issues that together aim to ensure that data in corporate systems is accurate, available, accessible and reliable. Most of the work required is done by data management teams as well as business intelligence managers.

Data is increasingly seen as a corporate asset that can be used to make more informed business decisions, improve marketing campaigns, optimize business operations and reduce costs, all with the goal of increasing revenue and profits. But lack of proper data management can burden organizations with incompatible data silos, inconsistent data sets, and data quality issues that limit their ability to run analytics and business intelligence (BI) applications or, worse, lead to faulty or inadequate results.

Data management has also become more important as companies are subject to an increasing number of regulatory compliance requirements, including privacy and data protection laws such as the GDPR, ISO 27000, SOC. In addition, companies are capturing increasing volumes of data and a wider variety of data types, both characteristic of the massive systems that many have implemented. Without good data management, such environments can become difficult to manage and difficult to navigate.

The separate disciplines that are part of the overall data management process cover a number of steps, from data processing and storage to governance of how data is formatted and used in operating and analytical systems. Developing a data architecture is often the first step, particularly in large organizations with plenty of data to manage. An architecture provides a model for databases and other data platforms to be deployed, including specific technologies to suit individual applications.

Databases are usually the most used platform for storing corporate data; they contain a collection of organized data so that they can be accessed, updated and managed. They are used both in transaction processing systems that create operational data, such as customer records and sales orders, and in data warehouses, which store consolidated data sets from commercial systems for BI and analytics. The administration of such databases is a core data management function. Once databases have been configured, performance should be monitored and adjusted to maintain acceptable response times in database queries that users run to obtain information from the data stored in them. Other administrative tasks include database design, configuration, installation and updates; data security; database backup and recovery; and application of software updates and security patches.