Relying simply on intuition is no longer possible – to gain a competitive advantage, it is essential to elevate your data-driven strategy. With Data Ingestion, you can access information faster and more efficiently by centralizing it in a single location. Here is an overview.
In a hyper-competitive and ever-changing business world, companies are in a race against time. A race that does not necessarily oppose their direct competitors but rather their customers. The challenge is to identify consumer trends to anticipate their expectations. Being the first to satisfy a given need or to enter an emerging market… These strategic conditions can be met through Data Ingestion.
Data Ingestion allows you to have an even finer knowledge of your customers and your market through the exploitation of increasingly heterogeneous data, and identify weak signals in order to anticipate trends quickly, but above all efficiently.
Understanding Data Ingestion
The principle of Data Ingestion is based on the idea of centralizing different sources of data in one place. By nature, this heterogeneous data needs to be meticulously cleaned and deduplicated in order to be brought together in a target environment for processing and exploitation. Whether your data comes from a data lake, customer files, or SaaS applications, it can be aggregated within a target site in order to reconcile it with one goal: to improve the understanding of a market, an ecosystem, or a target.
The term reconciliation perfectly sums up the purpose of Data Ingestion. The aim is to combine the knowledge contained in different types of databases to maximize the lessons learned.
What are the main benefits of data ingestion?
If you decide to embark on a Data Ingestion project, you will be able to reap various benefits. First, you will inevitably gain responsiveness and flexibility. Indeed, Data Ingestion tools are able to manage and process not only very large volumes of data but also a wide range of data types, including unstructured data. Data Ingestion also promises simplicity. With its ability to reconcile disparate information sources, Data Ingestion makes it much easier to extract data and restructure it into predefined formats to make it more usable.
The information that Data Ingestion gives access to can then be leveraged within advanced analytical tools. Maximizing the benefits of this in-depth knowledge of your customers or market will feed BI tools and make it easier for you to take a step back and define new strategic directions. Indeed, Data Ingestion contributes to simplifying access to data for your employees.
A more developed data culture also means faster and more informed decision-making and, consequently, a competitive advantage in defining more effective tactical and strategic levers.
What are the challenges of successful data ingestion?
Data Ingestion remains demanding, and a certain number of conditions need to be met to deliver its full potential. For example, ingesting very large volumes of very different data can raise data quality issues that can not only degrade the relevance of analyses but also lengthen processing times. In addition, the diversity of data sources mechanically increases exposure to vulnerabilities.
More complexity and more exposure to risk mechanically lead to a risk of increased processing costs. To succeed in a data ingestion project, you need to be aware of these risks in order to know how to protect yourself against them…
How to succeed in a Data Ingestion project?
The first piece of advice for an effective Data Ingestion project is to anticipate. Your ability to anticipate risks and difficulties depends on the proper mapping of your data assets.
Another lever is to activate automation. The volumes of data processed by data management are so massive that manual operations must be limited to a minimum. Automating the processing of information also has the advantage of providing more consistency in the structure of your data.
Finally, to maximize the chances of success of your Data Ingestion project, you can also consider opting for real-time Data Ingestion.
Also known as Streaming Data Ingestion, it is particularly suitable when you are looking to constantly update the knowledge you have of a market. This real-time ingestion provides a key answer to real-time decision-making issues.
