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

The Technical Challenge
Critical business information often resides across a variety of operating systems and databases within the enterprise. The reasons leading to this configuration are many, but the result is often silos of information that cannot be shared with other silos. Frequently, portions of the data contained in each of these silos is redundant, but not necessarily in-sync across platforms. This puts the business at risk of making decisions based upon divergent, inaccurate data sources. Isolated information silos simply do not work well in the real-time, on-demand business world.

Populating data across different databases has traditionally been done with ad hoc manual processing. This requires database administrators (DBAs) and application owners to develop and maintain customised procedures. This step often also includes copying the flat file over to a separate, potentially remote, target system before loading.

Make versus Buy: The Quest for Return on Investment
IT has come under increasing scrutiny because of the costs of data integration projects. Any ROI calculation must account for the following costs, using a fully burdened labour rate of
£80–100K per year:

• Development Costs: Each data-sharing source and target must be treated as a separate project. As requirements change each source and target pair will become a separate development project.

• Cost for Test Systems: These include RDBMS licensing, LPAR resources, storage, and additional RDBMS add-on products such as gateways that may be needed to implement an internally developed solution.

• Maintenance Costs: The cost of maintaining an internally developed data sharing solution that requires ongoing coding changes to adjust to new or altered data schemas, along with monitoring the running and accuracy of the supporting processes and testing with new DBMS/OS releases. Turnover in an IT department, which results in fewer people who are fully familiar with your data and application structures, can dramatically increase the costs of all of these activities.

• Opportunity Costs: There are costs in missed opportunities when IT staff has been dedicated to developing and maintaining an internal replication solution versus working on other internal projects.

The Alternative: Real-time, Standardised, Data Sharing
Acquiring a standardised data sharing solution quickly solves pressing data integration issues between critical applications that use databases such as Oracle, DB2, Informix, SQL Server, Sybase, or Teradata. A standardised data sharing and replication tool can provide access across the enterprise to accurate, real-time data, regardless of where it is created or resides, while saving the customer the cost of expensive and complex data integration projects.

A standardised software-based data sharing/replication solution can work well in an environment wanting to spend a minimum amount of time setting up and managing the data sharing process. These tools save time and money because they are database driven rather than programming driven.