BENEFITS OF DATA CENTRALIZATION

Data is increasingly becoming the new oil and currency of the now age we all find ourselves in. Data driven business leaders are emerging on a daily basis and this is placing more emphasis on the need to properly manage data for maximum benefits.

The adoption and implementation of risk-based data analysis process has fueled the need to further gather data of all sorts knowing fully well that the data analysts will surely make sense out of it. This ever-increasing activities in the data analysis space comes with some baggage – both positive and negative.

In this article on the benefits of data centralization, I will be exploring the potential gains that businesses stand to gain by centrally locating their data pipe.

What are the benefits of data centralization?

Below are seven benefits of data centralization that quickly accrues to organizations that centrally manages their data. Please note that centralization in this context does not mean that all the data will be in one physical location – that is a very bad construct of data management.

1. Encourages more of data driven decision making: the simple fact of having all your data accessible through a single channel will spur business managers and leaders that would have otherwise not bother into positive action towards making decisions that are back by data analysis and application of outcome from the process of analyzing the data.

• Minimizes risk of exposure during data breach: we all know that cybersecurity risk is going nowhere anytime soon. It has become an unfortunate ugly situation that we must have to deal with. The only difference is that how we deal with security and privacy breach incident matters. One of the ways of ensuring that the impact of data leak or breach is minimized is by happy as centralized data center as possible.

• Saves on storage costs: the economies of scale that comes from centralizing all your data center is one thing that might prove costly to ignore. I know that some people will be worried about the risk of having a single point of failure but to this people I advise that they should embrace technology by implementing some cloud-based redundancies in their data center management. It is no longer that expensive to implement raid and mirroring in storage and backup devices – so, use them.

• Improves the efficiency of modern-day Management Information System: the modern management information system (MIS) is all about improving the efficiency and quality of decision made in as secure as possible way. Creating a single gateway to your data through data centralization greatly enhances that chances that a business objective of making speedy decision will be achieved.

• Makes automation of workflow seamless: automations of workflows are very essential in successfully running business of any kind nowadays. Simple tasks as performing bank reconciliations can be automated these days. Having your data scattered all over the place could end up slowing down or completely hindering the automation process. In fact, the benefits of data centralization are felt more in the area of business process automation. Valuable time and efforts are saved by simple making sure that relevant data that are needed for a particular task are accessible through a single point.

• Makes it easy to manipulate and process data: this directly ties into the previous point of easing data the work of decision makers who heavily rely on data for their day to day activities. The data centralization benefit of easing manipulation makes it impossible for top management not to act responsibly because all the data needed for any task is always at their disposal.

• Makes updating and optimizing content of data warehouse easy: the fact that we only have to perform data entry once is a fantastic benefit that data centralization can bring to an entity. This is similar to the benefits of using ERP systems managing interconnected business processes.

Recall that data are still unprocessed information in their raw state. Therefore, can only be useful to decision makers when properly manipulated, communicated to the end users in the right format and that information is acted. In the information overload era that we now live in, any attempt to point people to so many directions for raw data for analysis maybe resisted. So, this article on the benefits of data centralization is coming at the right time and I hope I was able to convince you to see the reasons why you should seriously be considering gathering your data using data centralization business technologies that now abound.