Real-Time Data Sharing: What Can It Do For Business?

Advice 2010-07-16 13:13

Vision Solutions' Alan Arnold argues the case for a standardised data sharing

Alan Arnold, executive VP and CTO, Vision Solutions, discusses how senior managers expect IT teams to deliver consistent, high-quality data that creates a single view across the business.

But with data stored across multiple databases and platforms, where does this single view reside? Attempting to combine all data into one ‘logical’ database presents major data formatting, transformation and consistency challenges.
What if businesses could instead effortlessly replicate data from Oracle, Informix and SQL databases, and back again, without custom programming or large-scale integration costs? What if they could share data from one application to another in real time and could be assured that the data would be in the exact format each application and user needed?

Would it help if they could add a new customer, update an inventory balance or delete a stock item, and have these entire applications share the same information in real time? What would a business gain if you could break down isolated silos of user data and give everyone across the enterprise the same effortless access to accurate, current and complete data? What if a business could accomplish this without discarding or changing your investment in existing systems and databases? How much more productive could database staff be if a single-solution could be used to manage data sharing across all databases on all platforms?

The Business Challenge
Requirements for data sharing are common in today’s heterogeneous computing environment, and as business users continue to demand to use their ‘applications of choice’, this diversity is growing. Configuring disparate databases and applications to share their data stores in real-time ranks as one of today’s top IT/business alignment issues.

Traditional methods of data integration rely upon scheduled updates to move data to the centralised data store on a periodic basis. This may work for some situations, however these processes can take months to plan and implement. During that timeframe, many changes can occur in a company, marketplace and IT environment, which may impact the scope of the project and lengthen the delivery schedule. These solutions also do not scale well and are slow in accommodating future changes. Can a business really afford to invest such extensive time and budget resources when speed and flexibility have become competitive advantages?