An Introduction To Data Connectivity and Data Connectivity Solutions

Introduction

In today's world, data is the crux of major business decisions used by organizations all over the world. As such, it is imperative that the organizations have access to the right data and be able to analyze and make business decisions proactively. This article talks about data connectivity, the related concepts, its benefits, as well as a discussion on some data connectivity solutions.

Why Is Data Important?

Data comprises raw facts and statistics—the world dwells on data—you need data everywhere. Data is important since it helps organizations make informed decisions. You can take advantage of the right data to make better business decisions. Data helps businesses find new customers, improve the chances of customer retention, improve processes, improve customer service, and predict sales trends.

Data helps you understand the business processes in your organization, uncovering insights so that you have the opportunity to improve on those processes. You need the right data to be able to understand your customers as well.

Why Should I Keep My Data Safe?

In today's world, businesses need reliable and fast internet and data connectivity. Connectivity is the lifeblood of every organization; whether it's a small start-up or a big multinational business—we all need to stay connected and communicate. However, this opens doors for data breaches, i.e., a data leakage as a result of unauthorized access to confidential data, leading to compromised data.

Data breaches make the news often and might put your organization at risk. Since data is extremely important for a business to drive business decisions, it is imperative that you secure your data.

Data Connectivity: Why Does It Matter?

Organizations today need data connectivity solutions that are fast, stable, and cost-effective. Today's organizations have workforces that span geographical distances. You need the right connectivity to drive your business, keep your workforce productive, and drive customer satisfaction.

Data connectivity is of utmost importance in any data-driven initiative. Any data processing pipeline for data integration, data quality, data security, data masking, etc. starts and ends with connectivity; the data is read from somewhere and then written to somewhere else so that it can be consumed.

Data connectivity enables organizations to connect to disparate data sources in real-time. Data connectivity solutions provide you data in a usable form so that you can analyze the data and take advantage of business intelligence and visualization tools for effective, strategic, and operational decision-making. It enables businesses to drive interaction with audiences in a secure and effective manner.

What Is a Data Connectivity Solution?

Data Connectivity solutions help enterprises connect to disparate data sources such as BigData, Cloud, NoSQL, etc. in real-time to gain access to data for improved decision making. It can make these data sources simpler to use, more affordable, more dependable, and easier to integrate with other solutions, hence broadening the scope of how data can be used.

Essential Capabilities of Data Connectivity

This section lists some of the capabilities a good data connectivity solution should possess:

High performant: The performance of an operation that reads from or writes to a data store is a challenge primarily because storage is slowest among CPU, memory, or network. This performance problem might well become a bottleneck in your data processing pipeline. Hence you should ensure that you use the best technologies and storage mechanisms so that this challenge can be mitigated to some extent.

Intelligent: Data connectivity should be intelligent and adaptive. As an example, you can have data that is flat or relational, or even hierarchical. The data might reside in relational databases, document databases, CSV files, etc. When the data is present in the CSV files there might not be any column headers. When reading from such files the data connectivity solution should be adaptive—it should be adept to learn the schema and also able to read the data gracefully even if the schema has changed.

Flexible: Data connectivity should be flexible; it should be adept at establishing connections of various types and be able to work with various authentication and authorization mechanisms.

Secure: Data connectivity solutions should be secure; they should support authentication and authorization mechanisms so that unauthorized access to data can be prevented.

Broad and Ubiquitous: Your data might reside in the cloud, on-premise, in a relational database, a NoSQL database, data warehouse, anywhere! In other words, you might have your data spread across data stores that reside on the cloud, on-premises, relational or NoSQL databases, file systems, message buses, etc. You should be able to connect to a wide range of data sources.

Importance of Data Connectivity To Your Business

Data connectivity can take your business to the next level. The following are some of the ways data connectivity can help boost your business.

Artificial Intelligence: The usage of machine learning and natural language processing to recognize complex patterns on a huge amount of data and then be able to come up with predictions has become widely popular. Applications that leverage AI should have access to a high-speed network.

Internet of Things: The rate of IoT adoption has been growing exponentially—the impact of IoT on enterprises of all sizes has been very big, primarily because it can be applied in various areas such as communications, logistics, security, etc. For enterprises large and small alike, the need for data connectivity is more important than ever before. The need for data connectivity between people, things, and businesses has been growing leaps and bounds. Organizations today need high-speed data connectivity to improve business processes.

Cloud: A good and stable data connection ensures that you're able to use the cloud and leverage its capabilities as desired. If you have the right infrastructure and seamless data connectivity, you can move your data to the cloud easily. In essence, stable, fast data connectivity is the key to the best experience when you're accessing applications hosted in the cloud.

Colossal Volumes of Data: Today's organizations have to deal with colossal amounts of data; this data is then used to gain meaningful insights. This calls for the need for high-speed data connectivity. You need seamless data connectivity to ensure that you’re able to successfully work with such high volumes of data.

High Availability: High availability is the key to success in this customer-centric business world; it can only be possible if you have uninterrupted data connectivity. You should ensure that your customers and clients are able to reach your business at a time of their convenience. You should also ensure that your data connectivity provider is able to provide you consistently fast connectivity that is resilient to outages.

Complex data: In order to process huge volumes of complex data, it is imperative that the applications have access to a high-speed network for seamless data connectivity. You should take advantage of data analytics to optimize every area of your business—improving the order fulfillment process, reducing the overall costs, improving service level performance, maximizing customer value, etc.

Business Collaboration: To be successful, businesses need to collaborate and to make this collaboration a success, they need high-speed data connectivity and the right collaboration tools. Hence you should be able to select a data connectivity provider who can provide a low-latency, low jitter, hassle-free, high bandwidth connection.

Data Connectivity Solutions

If your application supports several data sources buying a data connectivity solution is the right choice. You might often not want your resources to build data connectivity solutions but rather focus on delivering innovation that can add business value.

Devart: Devart has been building data-centric applications for over two decades now. Many companies around the world take advantage of Devart Data Connectivity solutions. To build their data-driven applications. In essence, Devart Data Connectivity Solutions helps enterprises manage their data more efficiently and make better business decisions.

DataDirect: DataDirect offers secure data connectivity solutions that help businesses connect their cloud apps to any database or API.

Magnitude Connectivity Solutions: Magnitude Data Connectivity solution (Simba) is flexible and powerful - it helps enterprises connect to any application in real-time, anywhere.

Summary

In today's world, we need fast, reliable connectivity to get more done. Data matters much more than it did a couple of decades back. Whether you have your data in the cloud, on-premise, behind a firewall or etc., you should be able to provide uninterrupted real-time connectivity to the data. Data can help you improve processes, understand customers, solve problems and make better decisions.

Needless to mention, you should make sure that your connectivity is secure as well so that you don't get attacked. Today's developers should be able to build robust applications that are fast and can work with massive datasets using the latest technologies.