December 2, 2015
All of us in data management are experiencing an extended period of great change as big data, other categories of new data, and new data management platforms enter our organizations. In response, most user organizations are scrambling to learn the new technologies and—more important—how to leverage the new data and platforms for business advantage. As a result, many data professionals are now facing new requirements as well as future requirements that will arise as new data sources come online.
The changes afoot are driving many technical organizations to rethink and modernize their data management infrastructure, team, and skills. Among these efforts, data integration modernization is one of the most pressing because of the broad role data integration (DI) plays in capturing, processing, and moving data—both old and new. Without modern DI solutions, organizations cannot satisfy new and future requirements for big data, analytics, and real-time operation.
DI modernization can take many forms depending on the current state of your infrastructure and what kinds of new data or platforms you must embrace. Instead of trying to list them all here, we offer recommendations for the seven most pressing DI modernization tasks. These recommendations can guide your modernization efforts as you select vendor products and update your solution designs:
- Complement the high latency of older DI practices with a broader range of data ingestion techniques
- Embrace the new data prep practices and tools for agility, speed, simplicity, and ease of use
- Integrate data in ways that enable self-service access to new and big data for a wide range of users
- Modernize your data integration infrastructure by leveraging new data platform types
- Keep adding more right-time functions as you modernize your data integration solutions
- Modernize your data integration functionality to finally get business and analytic value from multi-structured and non-traditional data
- Consider modernizing your DI tool portfolio with an integrated platform of multiple data management tools
This TDWI Checklist Report drills into each of the seven recommendations and discusses many of the new vendor product types, their functionality, and user best practices that can contribute to DI modernization. We also present the business case and technology strengths of each recommendation.