Business Intelligence (BI) may not tell you what to do about your business or what will happen if you follow a certain direction. But, it provides a way for you to analyze data to recognize trends and derive actionable insights. However, to operationalize business intelligence and develop a data-driven culture, businesses must simplify access to accurate, unified and real-time data. And this is where data warehousing comes in.
In this article, we’ll talk about data warehouse and take a look at some of its key benefits for businesses.
What’s a Data Warehouse?
A data warehouse is a central repository of data stored from an extensive range of sources within and beyond the enterprise. It’s a technology that amasses structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data from single or multiple sources in order to deliver a unified view of data to analysts and business users for improved BI.
Many people often confuse a database with a data warehouse. While a database is merely a conventional technique to store data, the latter is a type of database that’s specially intended for data analysis. It stores everything in a single location from numerous external data banks.
7 Benefits of Using a Data Warehouse
We all know how important data is for companies. And how your business can advantage from data integration and analysis in a number of diverse ways.
Whether you own a digital marketing agency or have a traditional brick and mortar setup, data warehousing can yield several benefits for your business.
Below are 7 key benefits of data warehousing for your company.
Saves Time
In the modern fast-paced world of cut-throat competition, your capacity as a business to swiftly make refined decisions is essential to outpace your opponents.
A data warehouse provides you access to all your required data in a matter of minutes. So, you and your employees don’t have to dread an approaching deadline. All you need to do is use your data warehouse to acquire data within seconds. And most data warehouse building solutions allow you to do that without using a complex query or machine learning.
With data warehousing, your business won’t have to rely on the 24/7 availability of a technical expert to troubleshoot problems associated with retrieving information. This way, you can save plenty of time.
Improves Quality of Data
Refined quality of data helps guarantee that your company’s policies are based on precise information about your corporate exertions.
With data warehousing, you can transform data from multiple sources into a shared arrangement. This way you can ensure the reliability and quality of your corporate data. This way, you can identify and remove replica data, inadequately recorded data, and misinformation.
Implementing a data quality management program can be both costly and exceptionally laborious for your company. You can easily use a data warehouse to eliminate a number of these annoyances while saving money which will eventually justify your decision to invest in a data warehousing system.
After all, poor data quality is a burden for your business and can decline the overall efficiency of your plans.
Improves BI
You can use a data warehouse to gather, assimilate, and derive data from any source all through your business undertakings. As a result, your BI will improve by leaps and bounds, owing to the capability of effortlessly consolidating data from distinct sources.
Let’s face it: cross-referencing numerous data banks can be tough, and at times, unmanageable. But, with a data warehouse in place, everyone on your team can have an integrated understanding of all the relevant information in a timely manner.
A data warehouse allows your sales and marketing teams to track and identify which of your targets are dynamic and have accounts on social networking websites. So, if you’re running a promotion that targets females in their mid-twenties working in the beauty industry, your team can fetch profiles of your target audience using your data warehouse within seconds. They won’t even have to cross-reference worksheets and data banks.
Offers Standardization and Consistency
Another important benefit of using a data warehouse is the standardization of big data. Your business can benefit from a data storage or data mart in a similar arrangement. As data warehousing stores data from diverse sources, such as a transactional system, in a consistent fashion, each source will generate outcomes that are synchronized with other sources. This guarantees improved quality and homogeneity of data. Consequently, you and your team can feel assured that your data is correct, which will result in more cognizant corporate decisions.
Enhances Return on Investment (ROI)
According to a report by the International Data Corporation (IDC), using a data warehouse generates an average 5-year ROI of 112 percent with an average payback period of 1.6 years.
A data warehouse empowers you to increase your overall ROI by harnessing the value and acumen implanted within numerous data banks. As you increasingly make use of the information consolidated and systematized within the data warehouse, you achieve more out of your investment.
Thus, a data warehouse allows you to elucidate, enumerate, and validate the efficiency of your initiatives to higher management in terms of improved ROI.
Stores Huge Capacities of Past Data
As a data warehouse allows you to store large volumes of historical data from operational systems, you can easily investigate different time phases and inclinations that can be ground-breaking for your company. With the right and real time data in your hands, you can make superior corporate decisions concerning your business strategies.
Predicting the results of your business processes is a significant aspect of being a resourceful business person. It can be challenging to forecast the future without a tangible understanding of your historical achievements and letdowns.
For example, suppose you own a fashion brand and you plan to launch a promotional campaign for your new clothing line. With the help of your data warehouse, you can access and analyze historical data from your previous campaigns in order to identify which approach worked the best, and how you might emulate it in upcoming promotions.
You can’t expect to store and analyze such comprehensive past data in any conventional data bank. Thus, using a data warehouse gives you an advantage in your business procedures.
Increases Data Safety
Did you know that data-related complications cost a large number of businesses more than a whopping five million dollars every year?
But, with data warehousing, you can save yourself from the hassle of additional data security.
As a business that deals with customer information regularly, your first and foremost priority is to protect your existing and prospective consumers’ information. To evade all future nuisances, you take all the indispensable actions to escape data breaches. With a data warehouse, you can keep all your data sources consolidated and appropriately protected. This will significantly decrease the threat of a data breach.
A data warehouse allows improved security by offering cutting-edge safety characteristics erected into its set-up. Consumer information is a valuable resource for any company. But once safety becomes a problem, this information becomes your main burden.
Key Takeaway
These are just a few advantages that data warehousing has to offer for your business. If a data warehouse is implemented and designed appropriately, it can offer a wide range of benefits to your company. It provides you with improved business intelligence, robust decision support, superior business practices, and effective analytics processing.
It may seem like a huge investment today, but in the future, a data warehouse can help you reap maximum profits in terms of money, resources and improved business performance.
Originally published at https://www.astera.com on June 3, 2019.
