No matter if you own a retail business, a financial services company, or an online advertising business, data is the most essential resource for contemporary businesses. Businesses are becoming more aware of the significance of their data for business analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence across all industries.
Smart companies are investing in innovative approaches to derive value from their data, with the goals of gaining a deeper understanding of the requirements and actions of their customers, developing more personalized goods and services, and making strategic choices that will provide them with a competitive advantage in the years to come.
Business data warehouses have been utilized for all kinds of business analytics for many decades, and there is a rich ecosystem that revolves around SQL and relational databases. Now, a competitor has entered the picture.
Data lakes were developed for the purpose of storing large amounts of data to be used in the training of AI models and predictive analytics.
For most businesses, a data lake is an essential component of any digital transformation strategy. However, getting data ready and accessible for creating insights in a controllable manner remains one of the most complicated, expensive, and time-consuming procedures. While data lakes have been around for a long time, new tools and technologies are emerging, and a new set of capabilities are being introduced to data lakes to make them more cost-effective and more widely used.
Why Should Businesses Opt for Virtual Data Lakes and Data Virtualization?
Data virtualization provides a novel approach to data lakes; modern enterprises have begun to use logical data lake architecture, which is a blended method based on a physical data lake but includes a virtual data layer to create a virtual data lake. Data virtualization combines data from several sources, locations, and formats without requiring replication. In a process that gives many applications and users unified data services, a single "virtual" data layer is created. There are many reasons and benefits for adding a virtual data lake and data virtualization, but we will have a look at the top three reasons that will benefit your business.
Reduced Infrastructure Costs
Database virtualization can save you money by eliminating the need for additional servers, operating systems, electricity, application licensing, network switches, tools, and storage.
Lower Labor Costs
Database virtualization makes the work of a database IT administrator considerably easier by simplifying the backup process and enabling them to handle several databases at once.
Data Quality
Marketers are nervous about the quality and accuracy of the data that they have. According to Singular, in 2019, 13% responded that accuracy was their top concern. And 12% reported having too much data. Database virtualization improves data quality by eliminating replication.
Virtual Data Lake and Marketing Leaders
Customer data is both challenging as well as an opportunity for marketers. If your company depends on data-driven marketing on any scale and expects to retain a competitive edge, there is no other option: it is time to invest in a virtual data lake. In the omnichannel era, identity resolution is critical to consumer data management. Without it, business marketers would be unable to develop compelling
customer experiences.
Marketers could be wondering, "A data what?" Consider data lakes in this manner: They provide marketers with important information about the consumer journey as well as immediate responses about marketing performance across various channels and platforms. Most marketers lack insight into performance because they lack the time and technology to filter through all of the sources of that information. A virtual data lake is one solution.
Marketers can reliably answer basic questions like, "How are customers engaging with our goods and services, and where is that occurring in the customer journey?" using a data lake. "At what point do our conversion rates begin to decline?" The capacity to detect and solve these sorts of errors at scale and speed—with precise attribution and without double-counting—is invaluable.
Marketers can also use data lakes to develop appropriate standards and get background knowledge of activity performance. This provides insight into marketing ROI and acts as a resource for any future marketing initiatives and activities.
Empowering Customer Data Platform Using Data Virtualization
Businesses are concentrating more than ever on their online operations, which means they are spending more on digital transformation. This involves concentrating on "The Customer," their requirements and insights. Customers have a choice; switching is simple, and customer loyalty is inexpensive, making it even more crucial to know your customer and satisfy their requirements.
Data virtualization implies that the customer data platform (CDP) serves as a single data layer that is abstracted from the data source's data format or schemas. The CDP offers just the data selected by the user with no bulk data duplication. This eliminates the need for a data integrator to put up a predetermined schema or fixed field mappings for various event types.
Retail Businesses are Leveraging Data Virtualization
Retailers have been servicing an increasingly unpredictable customer base over the last two decades. They have the ability to do research, check ratings, compare notes among their personal and professional networks, and switch brands. They now expect to connect with retail businesses in the same way that they interact with social networks.
To accomplish so, both established as well as modern retail businesses must use hybrid strategies that combine physical and virtual businesses. In order to achieve this, retail businesses are taking the help of data virtualization to provide seamless experiences across online and in-store environments.
How Does Data Virtualization Help in the Elimination of Data Silos?
To address these data-silo challenges, several businesses are adopting a much more advanced data integration strategy: data virtualization. In reality, data virtualization and data lakes overlap in many aspects. Both architectures start with the assumption that all data should be accessible to end users. Broad access to big data volumes is employed in both systems to better enable BI and analytics as well as other emerging trends like
artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Data Virtualization can address a number of big data pain points with features such as query pushdown, caching, and query optimization. Data virtualization enables businesses to access data from various sources such as data warehouses, NoSQL databases, and data lakes without requiring physical data transportation thanks to a virtual layer that covers the complexities of source data from the end user.
A couple of use cases where data virtualization can eliminate data silos are:
Agile Business Intelligence
Legacy BI solutions are now unable to meet the rising enterprise BI requirements. Businesses now need to compete more aggressively. As a result, they must improve the agility of their processes.
Data virtualization can improve system agility by integrating data on-demand. Moreover, it offers uniform access to data in a unified layer that can be merged, processed, and cleaned. Businesses may also employ data virtualization to build consistent BI reports for analysis with reduced data structures and instantly provide insights to key decision-makers.
Virtual Operational Data Store
The Virtual Operational Data Store (VODS) is another noteworthy use of data virtualization. Users can utilize VODS to execute additional operations on the data analyzed by data virtualization, like monitoring, reporting, and control. GPS applications are a perfect example of VODS. Travelers can utilize these applications to get the shortest route to a certain location.
A VODS takes data from a variety of data repositories and generates reports on the fly. So, the traveler gets information from a variety of sources without having to worry about which one is the main source.
Closing Lines
Data warehouses and virtual data lakes are both effective methods for controlling huge amounts of data and advancing to advanced ML analytics. Virtual data lakes are a relatively new technique for storing massive amounts of data on commercial clouds like Amazon S3 and Azure Blob.
While dealing with ML workloads, the capacity of a virtual data lake and data virtualization to harness more data from diverse sources in much less time is what makes it a preferable solution. It not only allows users to cooperate and analyze data in new ways, but it also accelerates decision-making. When you require business-friendly and well-engineered data displays for your customers, it makes a strong business case. Through data virtualization, IT can swiftly deploy and repeat a new data set as client needs change.
When you need real-time information or want to federate data from numerous sources, data virtualization can let you connect to it rapidly and provide it fresh each time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Exactly Is a “Virtual Data Lake?”
A virtual data lake is connected to or disconnected from data sources as required by the applications that are using it. It stores data summaries in the sources such that applications can explore the data as if it were a single data collection and obtain entire items as required.
What Is the Difference Between a Data Hub and a Data Lake?
Data Lakes and Data Hubs (Datahub) are two types of storage systems. A data lake is a collection of raw data that is primarily unstructured. On the other hand, a data hub, is made up of a central storage system whose data is distributed throughout several areas in a star architecture.
Does Data Virtualization Store Data?
It is critical to understand that data virtualization doesn't at all replicate data from source systems; rather, it saves metadata and integration logic for viewing.