Top 10 Benefits of a Data Warehouse
IT Data Solutions
The benefits of a data warehouse include improved data analytics, greater revenue and the ability to compete more strategically in the marketplace.
By efficiently feeding standardized, contextual data to an organization’s business intelligence software, a data warehouse drives a more effective data strategy.
To gain these benefits, data warehouse tools use an array of related technology, including structured and unstructured data, ETL software, and data mining. Undergoing rapid change, data warehouses now often use cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to boost the speed and insight from data queries.
The benefits of a data warehouse are attracting enormous investment. The data warehouse market is predicted to grow to some $34 billion over the next five years, from its current size of approximately $21 billion.
The benefits of a data warehouse range from increased revenue to major competitive advantage.
Benefits of a Data Warehouse
1. Enables Historical Insight
No business can survive without a large and accurate storehouse of historical data, from sales and inventory data to personnel and intellectual property records. If a business executive suddenly needs to know the sales of a key product 24 months ago, the rich historical data provided by a data warehouse make this possible.
Also important, a data warehouse can add context to this historical data by listing all the key performance trends that surround this retrospective research. This kind of efficiency cannot be matched by a legacy database.
2. Enhances Conformity and Quality of Data
Your business generates data in myriad different forms, including structured and unstructured data, data from social media, and data from sales campaigns. A data warehouse converts this data into the consistent formats required by your analytics platforms. Moreover, by ensure this conformity, a data warehouse ensures that the data produced by different business divisions is at the same quality and standard – allowing a more efficient feed for analytics.
3. Boosts Efficiency
It’s very time consuming for a business user or a data scientist to have to gather data from multiple sources. It’s far more advantageous for this data to be gathered in one place, hence the benefit of a data warehouse.
Additionally, if for instance your data scientist needs data to run a fast report, they don’t need to get the assistance from tech support to perform this task. A data warehouse makes this data readily available – in the correct format – improving efficiency of the entire process.
4. Increase the Power and Speed of Data Analytics
Business intelligence and data analytics are the opposite of instinct and intuition. BI and analytics require high quality, standardized data – on time and available for rapid data mining. A data warehouse enables this power and speed, allowing competitive advantage in key business sectors, ranging from CRM to HR to sales success to quarterly reporting.
5. Drives Revenue
A tech pundit opined that “data is the new oil,” referring to the high dollar value of data in today’s world. Creating more standardized and better quality data is the key strength of a data warehouse, and this key strength translates clearly to significant revenue gains. The data warehouse formula works like this: Better business intelligence helps with better decisions, and in turn better decisions create a higher return on investment across any sector of your business.
Most important, these revenue gains build on themselves over time, as better decisions strengthen the business.
In short, a high quality, fully scalable data warehouse can be seen as less of a cost and more of an investment – one that adds exponential value like few other investments that businesses make.
