How a Data Warehouse Helps Your Company Grow
A Data Warehouse centralizes data from different systems for consistent analysis. It eliminates silos, speeds up decision-making, and helps determine which architecture to use.
Let’s repeat the obvious: you need to learn how to use your data! The best way to build a data-driven company is by having the right combination of tools within reach: technologies, professionals, metrics, and infrastructure—through a Modern Data Stack. Within it, a core element is the Data Warehouse.
What is a Data Warehouse?
We’ve already discussed here on the blog what an analytical database is and its advantages, so we decided to dive a bit deeper into this topic and explain how a Data Warehouse helps your company grow and increasingly transform into a data-driven organization.
First of all, it’s important that you understand what a Data Warehouse is. One of the challenges in your data-driven transformation is finding a data management and storage infrastructure that is suitable and makes sense to support and scale your data operations.
It’s also important that, in addition to being able to store a large volume of data, it has an interface and supports your Analytics and BI operations. In general, that’s what a Data Warehouse does.
It works like the nervous system of your data operations, or even like a large archive that contains and maintains all the information generated by the operations of your organization’s areas in a centralized directory, so it is available in a standardized and fast way whenever needed.
Over time, as new insights are created, the data owners of each department—such as marketing, sales, HR, product, and finance—will make new data available to be included in your Data Warehouse, so it is securely stored and can help support strategic decision-making, complementing the consolidated history and the interrelationship of each area with one another.
In this way, it helps enable the future use and application of BI and Analytics tools to support decision-making, scenario forecasting, and more realistic indicators of the organization’s situation. In other words: the Data Warehouse is an innovation that emerged mainly to support the analytical use of a company’s large data volumes, so they can be used end-to-end to guide decision-making.
What are the benefits of using a Data Warehouse?
Now that you know what a Data Warehouse does, we need to talk about the main benefits of this technology for your company.
Preservation of historical series
You know all the insights, data, and charts generated by your various systems—such as ERP, CRM, spreadsheets, emails, and other tools used in the day-to-day operations of your company’s areas? What does your company do with them, and how do they guide important decision-making? Having all this information standardized and centralized within your Data Warehouse is a very important step in your data-driven journey.
After all, to understand your past and perform well in the present (or even to make future projections), it is vital to have a historical series with reliable information and agility to retrieve what is needed. In cases where the organization already relies on legacy databases, they usually do not have this ability to store large volumes of data, which is fundamental to remain relevant in such a connected world.
Improves data efficiency and quality
In every modern business, data is obtained in different formats and from different sources, and is often structured or unstructured. Without a defined structure to formalize everything into a single format, it is simply impossible to make good strategic decisions!
A Data Warehouse keeps information up to date, standardized according to the format defined by the BI and Analytics tools used by the organization, and consequently makes the auditing and quality assurance process easier. This makes your data reliable and your analysis efficient.
Another important situation to consider is when it is necessary to quickly retrieve information to solve a problem or create a strategic action plan. Your Data Warehouse can help you find what is needed quickly and efficiently, avoiding wasted time for your IT professionals.
Avoids Data Silos
You may know this scenario: sales and marketing metrics don’t align, commercial and finance teams each organize themselves with their own systems and spreadsheets and no interface with one another, companies that depend on data managers’ reports and take too long to make decisions (month-end closing is always painful!)...
If this sounds familiar, it’s because you have already worked (or currently work) in a company that suffers from Data Silos. Since a Data Warehouse helps centralize information, they do not happen, and this saves time, important resources, and many meetings to discuss seasonal results.
Provides scalability
We know that nowadays “scalable” is one of those words people like to use when talking about their teams, solutions, and companies. That happens because the more room for growth, the better—and this same logic applies to your database. Today, the most modern Data Warehouses are built with the possibility of adding more elements to enable growth.
Conclusion A Data Warehouse is a modern and innovative way to centralize an organization’s data, and it is a key element of the Modern Data Stack.
There are several advantages to using it, but essentially it is a way to make your organization’s information more centralized, easier to access, and easier to integrate with your BI and Analytics tools.
A Data Warehouse is not the only database that can be implemented to support your data-driven journey. Other ways to store data are Data Lakes and Data Lakehouses, each offering its own advantages and disadvantages.
To learn more about how to launch your data-driven journey, access the articles on the Erathos blog and revolutionize your company’s strategy.
Let’s repeat the obvious: you need to learn how to use your data! The best way to build a data-driven company is by having the right combination of tools within reach: technologies, professionals, metrics, and infrastructure—through a Modern Data Stack. Within it, a core element is the Data Warehouse.
What is a Data Warehouse?
We’ve already discussed here on the blog what an analytical database is and its advantages, so we decided to dive a bit deeper into this topic and explain how a Data Warehouse helps your company grow and increasingly transform into a data-driven organization.
First of all, it’s important that you understand what a Data Warehouse is. One of the challenges in your data-driven transformation is finding a data management and storage infrastructure that is suitable and makes sense to support and scale your data operations.
It’s also important that, in addition to being able to store a large volume of data, it has an interface and supports your Analytics and BI operations. In general, that’s what a Data Warehouse does.
It works like the nervous system of your data operations, or even like a large archive that contains and maintains all the information generated by the operations of your organization’s areas in a centralized directory, so it is available in a standardized and fast way whenever needed.
Over time, as new insights are created, the data owners of each department—such as marketing, sales, HR, product, and finance—will make new data available to be included in your Data Warehouse, so it is securely stored and can help support strategic decision-making, complementing the consolidated history and the interrelationship of each area with one another.
In this way, it helps enable the future use and application of BI and Analytics tools to support decision-making, scenario forecasting, and more realistic indicators of the organization’s situation. In other words: the Data Warehouse is an innovation that emerged mainly to support the analytical use of a company’s large data volumes, so they can be used end-to-end to guide decision-making.
What are the benefits of using a Data Warehouse?
Now that you know what a Data Warehouse does, we need to talk about the main benefits of this technology for your company.
Preservation of historical series
You know all the insights, data, and charts generated by your various systems—such as ERP, CRM, spreadsheets, emails, and other tools used in the day-to-day operations of your company’s areas? What does your company do with them, and how do they guide important decision-making? Having all this information standardized and centralized within your Data Warehouse is a very important step in your data-driven journey.
After all, to understand your past and perform well in the present (or even to make future projections), it is vital to have a historical series with reliable information and agility to retrieve what is needed. In cases where the organization already relies on legacy databases, they usually do not have this ability to store large volumes of data, which is fundamental to remain relevant in such a connected world.
Improves data efficiency and quality
In every modern business, data is obtained in different formats and from different sources, and is often structured or unstructured. Without a defined structure to formalize everything into a single format, it is simply impossible to make good strategic decisions!
A Data Warehouse keeps information up to date, standardized according to the format defined by the BI and Analytics tools used by the organization, and consequently makes the auditing and quality assurance process easier. This makes your data reliable and your analysis efficient.
Another important situation to consider is when it is necessary to quickly retrieve information to solve a problem or create a strategic action plan. Your Data Warehouse can help you find what is needed quickly and efficiently, avoiding wasted time for your IT professionals.
Avoids Data Silos
You may know this scenario: sales and marketing metrics don’t align, commercial and finance teams each organize themselves with their own systems and spreadsheets and no interface with one another, companies that depend on data managers’ reports and take too long to make decisions (month-end closing is always painful!)...
If this sounds familiar, it’s because you have already worked (or currently work) in a company that suffers from Data Silos. Since a Data Warehouse helps centralize information, they do not happen, and this saves time, important resources, and many meetings to discuss seasonal results.
Provides scalability
We know that nowadays “scalable” is one of those words people like to use when talking about their teams, solutions, and companies. That happens because the more room for growth, the better—and this same logic applies to your database. Today, the most modern Data Warehouses are built with the possibility of adding more elements to enable growth.
Conclusion A Data Warehouse is a modern and innovative way to centralize an organization’s data, and it is a key element of the Modern Data Stack.
There are several advantages to using it, but essentially it is a way to make your organization’s information more centralized, easier to access, and easier to integrate with your BI and Analytics tools.
A Data Warehouse is not the only database that can be implemented to support your data-driven journey. Other ways to store data are Data Lakes and Data Lakehouses, each offering its own advantages and disadvantages.
To learn more about how to launch your data-driven journey, access the articles on the Erathos blog and revolutionize your company’s strategy.