How to Choose the Best Data Integration Software for Business

When quality data is used for business insights and data analytics, enterprises do better in revenues. Extracting these insights from high volumes of enterprise data requires robust and seamless data integration. It can be either manually or with the help of robust automation using a data integration software. Businesses store their data in a multitude of databases, data lakes, repositories, and file systems–ranging from legacy to modern–that vary in formats.

Efficient data management is necessary because data increases rapidly every day, and not all of it is useful; most of it includes outdated, incomplete, compromised, inconsistent, or simply “bad” data, which 77% of businesses attribute to having a direct effect on their bottom line. Hence, best data integration  that support automation are important for ensuring a business’s efficiency.

But what are data integration tools?

These tools collect, consolidate, cleanse, and present data in a unified manner. In short, they unify critical business data. Extracting analysis-worthy information from this deluge of big data is a critical, yet challenging task (due to the sheer volume and velocity of incoming data). This can be tackled using a robust data integration solution that easily integrates data from multiple sources. The best integration tools can be easily found in popular review sites, such as G2 Crowd.

What is Data Integration?

The definition of data integration is the process of combining, cleaning, and presenting data in a unified form. This includes bringing together data from a wide variety of source systems with disparate formats. removing duplicates, cleaning data based on business rules, and transforming it into the required format. The data integration layer points to the change between raw integrated data.

However, enterprise data integration also covers various other areas like data migration, application integration, and master data management. Code-free tools, with the aid of a data integration layer, help business users access data from different sources in real-time and comb through business data lakes and repositories to derive business intelligence faster.

Consider the following database integration example: merging data from two sources (file and database) and sending it to a database destination. Data quality rules are applied to the phone column, and the fields with errors are logged separately.

Using a dataflow or data integration solution, a business can ensure that all errors within the required fields are handled suitably, and the data flowing into the final database destination is actionable.

Need for Data Integration Sofware

The need for a top data integration software across different industries is broad and varies depending on the business’ needs of integrating data from multiple resources and on the volume and complexity of data. For instance,

• A health center may need a data integration software to consolidate and manage its multi-source real-time data related to patients and employees. Therefore, having real-time data integration sof can hasten the processes for a healthcare organization.
• An online vehicle buy-and-sell business may need a real-time data integration software to update millions of records daily and cut down customer onboarding time from months to hours by mapping the client data to the company database.
• An office of investments may need real-time data integration solution to map the institution’s endowment data from disparate source systems (including both internal systems and external money managers) into a tracking software program for risk analysis.

Each business data integration use case can construct a process to automate manual tasks and streamline processes for accuracy. At its core, the data integration system performs the processes of combining, cleaning, and moving data from source(s) to destination, and different approaches can achieve this.

Common Data Integration Approaches

Data integration techniques have evolved over the years from manual to automated solutions. Top data integration softwares have advanced data integration features making it easy to consolidate data. Businesses can implement integrating data from disparate sources using any of these approaches depending on their varying needs.

1. Manual

The manual data integration technique involves a user manually collecting data from disparate source systems, applying quality rules to clean it, and uploading it to the target databases. It also involves hand-coding for every new use case to ease the mapping of datasets.

2. Middleware

Middleware software creates a virtual “pipeline” between multiple systems, allowing bi-directional communication. This connectivity streamlines integration tasks.

3.  Data virtualization/Data federation

Data virtualization takes a completely different approach from physically moving data to and from databases. In this process, data virtualization tools do not move data across the systems—instead, an abstraction layer provides a unified view of the disparate systems, leaving the data exactly where it is physically.

Data analysts can then request information through the virtual layer, which contains the metadata to access the sources. This process allows businesses to get real-time access to their data without exposing the technical details of the source systems, and quickly make enterprise-wide changes on the virtual layer instead of first consolidating the data in one place or implementing changes at each source separately. This integration approach does not support bulk data movement, although it can run alongside ETL or ELT processes.

4. Data warehouse/physical data integration

This technique includes the use of top cloud-based ETL tools for moving data from the source system to a data warehouse integration layer or other physical destination like a data lake. Businesses prefer this process due to the ease and flexibility in storing, viewing and managing all their data in a centralized location. With the rapidly advancing technology, organizations are rapidly shifting their databases to the cloud, giving rise to cloud-based integration tools.

There are two approaches to this method: ETL (extract, transform, load) and ELT (extract, load, transform). Both techniques employ the three individual processes of extracting, transforming, and loading data onto a destination. However, the main difference is where the staging area resides for the data transformation process.

• ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)

In this ETL data integration approach, data is extracted, the transformation logic is applied, and the resulting data is loaded onto the target database or data lake destination. Due to the extensive availability of frameworks and tools that support ETL, this approach is great for businesses that need to integrate and process large volumes of data, though the processing time is higher for larger volumes.

• ELT (Extract, Load, Transform)

This technique involves first loading the extracted data onto the target destination, then applying the transformation logic within the database or data warehouse. Because the ETL infrastructure is removed from the equation and the transformation occurs directly within the database, the total power consumed by the system and the data latency is significantly reduced.

There are several cloud-based ETL tools available in the market, hence it is crucial that you research thoroughly for the top data integration tool that fits your business use case.

Types of Integration Tools

List of common EDI or enterprise data integration (EDI) tools used for consolidating data from multiple data sources to a data warehouse integration layer include:

1. On-premise Data Integration

Businesses that process legacy and/or higher volumes of data typically use on-premise data integration software, which is launched locally using their own servers.

Who uses on-premise data integration tools?

Businesses that require full control over the integration tool and have big data architects to set up workflows as the need arises.

2. Cloud-based Data Integration

Cloud data integration tool providers typically host their iPaaS (integration platform as a service) solutions on third-party servers, which are usually web-based. It is important to note that people often confuse ETL with iPaaS, as iPaaS is considered “the successor” of ETL.

Who uses cloud-based integration tools?

Top cloud-based data integration tools help businesses using cloud applications with a simple use case, routing their big data to a workflow and loading the transformed data to the preferred destination(s).

How Data Integration Tools Help Businesses?

With the massive influx of information coming from multiple source systems, businesses need to proactively handle the five Vs of data—value, variety, velocity, veracity, and volume. With a robust data integration tool, an enterprise can extract the most, standardize the variety of information, deal with the data velocity on time, improve the veracity, and easily process volumes of data. Here are some of the ways how tools that data integration companies use help grow their businesses.

1. Faster time-to-value

Businesses use approachable data integration tools to create a single source of truth for their data and speed up their internal processes, reaching valuable insights faster by automating the data integration process. For instance, Randolph-Brooks Federal Credit Union wanted to migrate their legacy data, clean it, and convert it into various formats. What would have taken them a week, only took them half a day with an integration tool. Similarly, healthcare data integration can help doctors efficiently make time-critical decisions.

2. Smarter, better-informed business decisions

A smart data integration approach allows businesses to better manage, measure, monetize, and make targeted decisions based on quality data. With the top data integration tools, business users can directly access data they need without having to constantly request it from IT, get a complete view of their customer behavior and use strategic insights from their clean data to gain an edge over the competition. Smart data integration management is key for an effective process for the prompt delivery of insights.

3. Maintain quality data and improve revenues

Data quality correlates directly to the positive or negative impact on business decisions. When data is up-to-date, clean, and insightful, businesses can improve their revenues by up to 66%. With a high-quality database, businesses can extract insights and sculpt better decisions that meet their goals without being hindered by bad-quality data.

However, top cloud-based ETL tools further offer secure and mobile access to data which can aid disaster recovery and collaboration. Having a data integration solution with built-in features to clean incoming data and automate the data integration process is crucial for an enterprise.

Choosing the Best tool for Your Enterprise

When evaluating enterprise data integration platforms and data integration companies, it is imperative to ensure that the solution offers a host of data integration capabilities that will make your data journey easier. Here are some features – based on common use cases – that you should look for in an enterprise data integration software:

1. Bi- and multi-directional data synchronization

In many use cases, systems need to update data not only in one destination, but also in other systems to maintain consistency and ensure the authenticity of the data throughout the business network. A data integration tool should be able to offer accurate and timely synchronization between the connected systems.

2. Workflow automation

Data integration is generally not a one-time job. Typically, users need to clean, transform, sync and make the incoming data sets available to the intended users multiple times. It is important that the solution has data integration features such as trigger-based workflows that allow data scientists to automate repetitive tasks and simplify the integration process. Users can easily schedule a workflow to run at a specific time or trigger it when a specific event criterion is met.

3. Quick data processing

Businesses can assign more time and resources to enterprise scaling and other revenue-based decisions once they decrease the usual time it takes for integration tasks and replaces them with faster solutions. A robust integration tool should be able to process volumes of data quickly and efficiently, without consuming too much time for any part of the process.

In industries like finance and healthcare, where processing and analyzing large volumes of data is critical and directly affects their clients, this feature can simplify business data integration tasks and ensure a manageable level of data latency.

4. Support for multiple source systems and formats

Enterprises work with multiple formats and sources of data, including legacy and modern formats, structured, unstructured, and semi-structured sources. A top data integration software should provide a complete solution by offering support to all of these and integrate data from multiple resources.

5. Data cleansing and profiling

Missing fields, duplicates, and invalid data are major data quality issues that hamper the effect of otherwise smart business strategies, and instead, result in negative customer experiences and missed opportunities. Data cleansing is a component of the integration process that identifies and weeds out the bad data and ensures that business analysts have the most updated information to derive insights from and base their strategies on.

6. Instant data previews

When creating complex data models and workflows, it is important to be able to preview the input or output data at any node in the flow before execution. Data previews allow for better flexibility and visibility into the mappings and enable users to check for issues at various instances and correct them before running the entire flow.

Once the data is clean and updated, business analysts need data profiling to extract valuable statistics, insights, and summaries from the database which they can utilize in informed business decisions. Both these features are must-haves in data integration software.

Streamline Enterprise Data Integration with Astera Centerprise

Astera Centerprise is an industry-grade, high-performance automated data integration solution and data integration company that helps businesses make the most of their existing and incoming data with easy mappings, transformations, pre-built connectors, and more.

With the ability to process volumes of data with its powerful parallel-processing ETL engine and supporting a wide range of source systems and formats along with multiple data integration features, the tool eases the way to enterprise integrations.

Whether you want to translate complex schemas, use pushdown optimization to reduce your processing time, update and manage data in real-time or migrate your data to different database location(s), Astera Centerprise integration platform can help you set up and improve your data process without any manual coding thanks to its drag and drop designer. Download the free trial today and experience the benefits for yourself!