How Data Ingestion Actually Boosts Breakthrough Innovation

Modern data ingestion automation allows organizations innovate and stop wasting investments in outdated technologies & manual processes

Businesses use all sorts of systems to communicate, engage, manage, and delight customers. These systems reflect platforms for email, social, loyalty, advertising, mobile, web, and a host of others.

Guess what these systems generate a lot of? A critical business asset, data.

The Economist proclaimed that data is now “the world’s most valuable asset”. Harvard Business Review reported that 80% of an analysts’ time is spent just preparing data for reporting. The NY Times also reported that data “Janitor Work” is a crucial hurdle to insights outcomes.

When this data is hidden and locked in these systems it clogs operations, block insights, and cripples informed decision making.

Smart, effective use of data can be a competitive advantage for a business.

Don’t feel like you are alone in this data struggle to use data for competitive advantage. Organizations large and small struggle and waste valuable capital investments in outdated data technologies and manual processes which are direct barriers to innovation.

Data Ingestion and breaking down data silos

When data resides hidden in these external systems, they are data silos — information that is unseen and untapped for insights and decision making.

However, breaking down silos traditionally required costly data preparation and integration work.

The good news is that breaking down silos and simplifying access to data is more cost-effective and efficient than ever. New tools and platforms reduce or eliminate complex data preparation and integration work.

A key part of this new process of automation of data ingestion from external (or internal) systems.

What is data ingestion?

Data ingestion describes the first stage of a data pipeline.

First, what we need to define a pipeline? At a high-level, a pipeline moves a resource from a low-value place to a place of high value. For example, a pipeline moves water from reservoirs (low-value location) to homes (high-value location).

The same is true for a data pipeline. A data pipeline reflects the movement from data sources (or systems where data resides) to data consumers (or those who need data to undertake further processing, visualizations, transformations, routing, reporting, or statistical models).

The process of data ingestion is responsible for mobilizing data as part of a data pipeline process.

Data ingestion challenges

Data ingestion solves a major stumbling block moving something from being inaccessible to accessible. The inaccessibility refers to a “last mile” gap between the data sources and data consumers. Historically, there is a fair amount of technical complexity involved in solving this gap. This was traditionally solved by complex ETL tools and systems integrators.

Applying traditional approaches to modern data challenges have proven difficult and resource-intensive given undocumented data sources, ill-defined business logic, and legacy systems.

A common misperception with data ingestion is that it is already solved. Why? Well, the data sources have APIs and SDKs so that means everything is automagically solved. No, not really. Data ingestion can be daunting, despite having access to APIs or SDKs. An API or SDK is meant to facilitate, not solve, access to the data. Think of an API as a door, you have to walk through it and you are not sure what you are going to find on the other side.

Solving the last mile data ingestion challenge can have a massive payoff. When data ingestion, and more broadly data pipelines, are in place, it means data is convenient to consume, approachable, comprehensible, and usable. Solving for automated data ingestion allows teams to focus on using data, not wrangling it.

Data Ingestion Automation

The good news is there are innovative, ground-breaking solutions that are solving these challenges with code-free, fully-managed automated data ingestion solutions. Self-service data ingestion tools reduce or eliminate what has historically been a time-consuming endeavor to create data processing pipelines.

Successful data ingestion pipelines reduce or eliminate costly manual aggregation, organizing, converting, routing, mapping, and storing data.

For example, customers use the Openbridge platform to support Tableau data ingestion to an AWS data lake destination. Here are two examples of a data ingestion pipeline architecture for Tableau and data lakes:

Customers that leveraged our AWS data lake ingestion service for Tableau, Adobe Data Feeds, and Amazon MWS realized reduced operational costs, increased analytics velocity, and improved the quality of business insights.

Getting Started With Automated Data Ingestion

Is your team stuck wasting precious time manually wrangling data from email, social, e-commerce, or loyalty platforms? Are you interested in data ingestion automation to reduce costs and improve productivity?

Openbridge offers ELT data ingestion as a service. The service includes batch data ingestion service as well as streaming API data infections.

In addition to our batch data processing system and streaming API, we also offer pre-built data pipelines to popular services like Facebook, Amazon MWS, Adobe Data Feeds, Google Ads, Salesforce, Google Analytics 360, YouTube, and many others.

If you do not want to learn complex ETL and are looking for a code-free, fully automated, zero administration data ingestion to data lakes or cloud warehouses, we have you covered.

Code-free, zero-admin, fully automated data ingestion pipelines to leading cloud warehouses and lakes.

Get started with data lakes or cloud warehouses like Azure Data Lake, AWS Redshift, AWS Redshift Spectrum, AWS Athena, and Google BigQuery for free!

DWant to discuss data ingestion? Need a platform and team of experts to kickstart your data and analytics efforts? We can help!

Getting traction adopting new technologies, especially if it means your team is working in different and unfamiliar ways, can be a roadblock for success. This is especially true in a self-service only world. If you want to discuss a proof-of-concept, pilot, project, or any other effort, the Openbridge platform and team of data experts are ready to help.

Reach out to us at hello@openbridge.com. Prefer to talk to someone? Set up a call with our team of data experts.

How Data Ingestion Actually Boosts Breakthrough Innovation was originally published in Openbridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

source https://blog.openbridge.com/how-data-ingestion-actually-boosts-breakthrough-innovation-b3ce1890e7c2?source=rss----4c5221789b3---4

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