Data is increasingly becoming a crucial asset for organizations to survive in today’s fast moving business world. In addition, data becomes more valuable if enriched and/or fused with other data. Unfortunately, enterprise data is dispersed by most organizations over numerous systems all using different technologies. To bring all that data together is and has always been a major technological challenge.
In addition, more and more data is available outside the traditional enterprise systems. It's stored in spreadsheets, simple file systems, cloud applications, in weblogs, in social media systems, and so on. and stored in traditional databases. And organizations are now confronted with new technologies such as Big Data systems and applications running in the cloud.
For each system that requires data from several systems, different integration solutions are deployed. In other words, integration silos have been developed that over time has led to a complex integration labyrinth. The disadvantages are clear:
- Inconsistent integration specifications
- Inconsistent results
- Decreased time to market
- Increased development costs
- Increased maintenance costs
The bar for integration tools and technology has been raised: the integration labyrinth has to disappear. It must become easier to integrate data from multiple systems, and integration solutions should be easier to design and maintain to keep up with the fast changing business world.
All these new demands are changing the rules of the integration game, they demand that integration solutions are developed in a more agile way. One of the technologies making this possible today is Data Virtualization.
This course focuses on Data Virtualization. The technology is explained, advantages and disadvantages are discussed, products are compared, and use cases are discussed.
