It is well-said data is the new oil that powers the engine of growth in the 21st century. Proper use of marketing and other business data enables companies to take appropriate decisions, at appropriate time, to gain a decisive advantage in a dynamic, highly-competitive business world.

How can organizations make the best use of data? One of the key aspects they need to focus on is using a robust Enterprise Data Warehousing (EDW) solution. A good EDW solution enables a company leverage information stored in its operational databases as well as historical business data effectively, allowing the company to perform comprehensive data analyses to gain actionable insights.

Today, we’ll look at a few aspects that help you zero-in on the right EDW solution that perfectly meets your needs.

Developing a solid business case

This is the first (and most important) aspect you should consider; a well-formulated business case helps you clearly identify the benefits of and challenges involved in using an effective EDW system and come up with a suitable plan of action. While it’s true no two companies have the same EDW needs, you can build a solid business case for the selection of an effective EDW solution by finding the right answers to these questions.

• What are the problems in ensuring seamless access to business data across your organization?
• Where are the sources of business data and how does the data flow across various systems?
• How do you monitor and assess the quality of business data? What can be done to make this more efficient?
• How do you manage various groups of data users? What are the issues faced and how can they be resolved?
• What are the data audit and security challenges faced by your organization and how can they be resolved?

Evaluating your IT infrastructure thoroughly

Proper evaluation of your IT infrastructure is critical to making a key choice – whether to go in for an on-premise EDW system or opt for a cloud-based solution. An on-premise solution may incur huge infrastructure expenditure as you need to procure various IT and hardware components. On the other hand, you have total control over the EDW system and can enjoy high levels of speed, data security and system performance.

Coming to cloud-based systems, you need to spend little on IT infrastructure and pay only for what you use. Many cloud-based EDW products also come with Identify and Access Management (IAM) and data analytics capabilities built into them and offered at very competitive prices. Cloud-based EDW solutions are highly scalable and help you meet your dynamic requirements.

Several organizations are adopting an approach called hybrid cloud to avail the benefits of both on-premise and cloud-based EDW systems. A hybrid-cloud-based EDW system allows companies to carry out some EDW activities on-site, while others are performed on the cloud. This reduces the IT infrastructure costs considerably, compared to a fully on-site solution. Furthermore, you have the flexibility of moving the activities to the cloud based on your requirements. Whatever be your choice – on-premise, cloud or hybrid cloud, consider the total cost of the EDW solution, before you ink a deal to buy one. More about costs in a moment.

Considering the total cost of the EDW solution

The total cost of an EDW solution is made up of various elements, and it is very important to have a good idea of those to zero-in on the right solution that provides the best value for your money. As we’ve seen earlier, one of these elements is the expenditure on IT infrastructure. The other costs pertaining to an EDW product are as follows.

• Solution deployment cost, incurred on various activities such as:
  • Planning and management of the EDW implementation project
  • Designing and developing the solution based on your unique needs
  • Testing and implementing the solution in your environment
• Data development and management costs pertaining to:
• Designing and developing data extraction and integration
• Creating a comprehensive data warehousing model
• Operation and Maintenance (O&M) costs such as:
• Maintaining the license of the EDW solution
• Performing periodic upgrades to the system
• Archiving and recovering the data in the EDW system
• Implementing a data disaster recovery plan

Make sure you consider these costs while evaluating the ROI provided by various EDW products.

Examining the EDW system’s performance

You need to remember seamless, quick use of data in a data warehouse is essential for achieving success, and this is possible only when the performance of your EDW systems is consistently high. So, make sure you evaluate the performance of various EDW products before choosing one. Here are three questions that help you analyze the performance of likely data warehousing products for your enterprise.

1. Is there a performance standard indicated by the EDW solution provider that helps you put the solution’s performance in perspective?
2. In case of cloud-based solutions, does the solution provider allow you to deploy projects on a non-virtualized (bare metal) cloud platform?
3. How does the EDW solution facilitate accelerated execution of queries?

Creating a robust deployment process

You must define a solid process to deploy an EDW solution, and this needs to be done before you buy the solution to facilitate its seamless use. It is necessary to answer the following questions when you develop the deployment process.

• What are the datasets needed to use the EDW product?
• How will the data be organized and expressed?
• How will the data from various sources be integrated with the EDW solution?
• What is the architecture used for the data warehouse of your enterprise?
• What is the tool used to automate EDW-related activities?

Formulating an effective data access and integration strategy

No matter which EDW product you opt for, it is very important to make sure data flows seamlessly into the data warehouse of your company and is integrated properly to enable timely, effective analysis of the data. You need to keep the following in mind, when you develop a data access and integration strategy for the EDW solution.

• The network connections between various sources of data and the EDW solution
• The procedure to be adopted when the EDW solution exceeds its network capacity 
• The rules applied for standardization and conversion of data for consumption by the EDW system
• The Change Data Capture (CDC) mechanism to be used for the EDW solution
• The data compression methods used to reduce the time required to transmit the data from an external source to the EDW system

By focusing on the aspects listed above, you can choose the product that perfectly meets your EDW needs. At Mergen, we work with you to identify the right EDW solution for your business and help you harness the full potential of cutting-edge EDW systems such as Teradata, IBM, Google BigQuery and so on. 

Hope you enjoyed going through this post. How do you think companies can make the best use of their EDW solutions? We’d love to know.