Data management refers to a set of activities for efficiently gathering, organizing, securing and storing the business’s data. Effective data management enables companies to better analyze information, increase operational efficiency, enhance security and comply with regulations.
Data management is more important than ever as companies undergo digital transformation and automate their business processes. Many businesses now get data from disparate data sources, including software as a service (SaaS) applications, application programming interfaces (APIs), mobile apps and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Data management enables companies to combine data from all those sources to create a single, consistent set of information. Data management should involve people from across the business groups as well as the IT group because it requires a deep understanding of the company’s data, how it is used, and what the business needs from its data.
Data management functions include:
- Understanding and documenting data flows between systems.
- ETL (extract, transform and load) processing, which takes data from operational systems like point-of-sale (POS) applications and transforms it into a model optimized for analytical processing.
- Data cleansing, part of ETL processing, to eliminate data duplication and check data quality and integrity.
- Creating data catalogs, which hold a complete picture of the data assets in your organization, stored in one easy-to-find location. It details the location, security levels and content of each data set, as well as information such as the date of last change and the quality of the data. This enhances security and allows your organization to derive more value from its data analysis.
- Creating data warehouses, data marts and/or data lakes that join and store data from a variety of systems. Traditional on-premises data warehouses store structured data for analysis. Modern data management systems also support cloud data warehouses as well as data lakes, which can handle unstructured information, such as streaming data, as well as structured data.
- Establishing data governance, which applies standard practices and company policies to maintain the security and integrity of the data over time.
- Securing data through encryption, access control and network architecture so that the company can use best practices to prevent attacks as well as limit loss in the event of breaches and understand which data has been affected.
Key Takeaways
- Data management involves gathering, organizing, securing and storing data to provide a single source of trusted information.
- Data management helps businesses manage the growing volume of data from disparate applications, IoT devices and other internal and external sources.
- Data management helps businesses analyze information for better decisions, improve data quality, share information among users, improve sensitive data security and comply with regulations.
- Key data management functions include data governance, cataloging data, cleansing and moving data between systems and managing data warehouses and data lakes.