How does Data Preparation Automation Improve Time to Insights?

Today, most businesses depend on the data, and the data generated and consumed for the purpose are massive. It is an undeniable fact that with growing technology, the amount of data will keep on increasing in the coming years. It is assumed that by the end of this decade, the total amount of data will cross approximately 572 Zettabytes, which is almost ten times more than the amount of data present. Ultimately this will be a challenging task for an organization, as it will become hard to manage and organize data. Besides, this process of collecting meaningful data from the accumulated one becomes a time-consuming process.

One of the top challenges organizations face is obtaining real-time insights and staying ahead in the market from competitors and the resultant pressure to work faster together. 

We all know that doing everything manually has become an impossible task as it brings in many challenges. Therefore automation is the best option for organizations to earn valuable information and streamline the data transformation process. As per the data fabric trends report, it has been estimated that the data automation market size will extend up to $4.2 billion (€3.56 billion) in 2026.

Strategic data automation:

When people come across the concept of automation, there is a common misconception that automating business processes means replacing human resources with technology. It is essential to understand that automation does not take the place of humans in the workspace; instead, they ease their work by helping them complete tasks seamlessly and efficiently. No technology can replace human brains for doing any jobs. Though most of the repetitive and monotonous business processes can be automated, the basic need to implement business logic and rules to be used within the code is done manually.

Interpreting and making the right decision needs human intelligence for conducting various complex data analyses, and it can never be replaced.

Even after the availability of developers, the growing need for automation will fail to keep with the increasing amounts of data and gather expedient insights from it. Manual coding to execute the necessary logic into automation will be an arduous task when it has to be performed with a considerable amount of data in a given time. 

Exploring new ways for data preparation and business automation will help in obtaining insights promptly. Today, many data preparation tools are available in the market that provides trusted, current and time-based insights. These tools encrypt the available data and make it safe and secure.

Why do we need an automatic data transformation process?

Besides the need to automate repetitive and monotonous tasks and offer the organizations more time to work on the other complex data processing and analyzing, automation provides various other benefits. The list is as follows:

• Manage data records – Automating data transformation methods empowers firms to organize new data set effectively. This will result in maintaining the comprehensive data sets and making them available whenever needed.
• Concentrate on main priorities –  Business intelligence(BI) is just not meant to deliver timely and meaningful insights. They are assigned to work on innovative initiatives. Automation tasks provide them much time to work on business’ vital aspects.
• Better decision making – Automation permits fast access to more comprehensive and detailed information. This enables management teams to create vital and speedy business decisions.
• Cost-effective business processes –  Time management is an essential factor for any business.  Time is a critical factor in any industry. Automating the processes like data transformation and other data related tasks reduces the cost and resources consumption and ensures better results.

Ways to automate workflow

Employing of a built-in scheduler and third-party scheduler:

ELT (“extract, load, and transform”) products have a built-in scheduler. This ends the dependence on the third-party application or any other platform to launch the product. ELT tools also allow managing tasks centrally that making it easier to control and manage the tasks. 

Additionally, another benefit of using ELT tools is dependency management. Here a primary job can be used to start a second job. Dependency management allows an organization to categorize tasks and make management seamless. Many platforms enable performing APIs, and API calls can be scheduled in a specified way adopting the operating system’s built-in scheduler. Many third-party tools can perform ELT tasks. Employing these tools will offer functionalities to integrate with existing systems within the development environment. But, if one has to use third-party ELT tools, then additional charges have to be paid for services and resources used to execute a product.

Cloud service provider services:

Today, companies are switching to cloud technologies. It has been observed that  94% of enterprises have already adopted the cloud. In addition to storing and managing data, CSPs provides many other services that support automation. Like using messaging services to start a task. Any production tasks or custom tasks that hold messaging can listen to the upcoming messages in a job queue and start a job based on the content of the message. However, the general working concept remains the same. Some examples of messaging services are AWS SQS, Microsoft Azure Queue Storage. 

Furthermore, CSPs also offer serverless functions to aid with automation, and this serverless functionality can automatically activate the jobs. The benefit of using serverless functions is that the company only has to pay for service when it is in use. Google Cloud and AWS Lambda functions are some of the known examples of serverless cloud services.

Conclusion:

In the upcoming years, integrating processes with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, automation will become easy and efficient. This will help organizations prepare data and acquire more meaningful insights. But to embrace these technologies, organizations should be ready to accept and welcome the changes that accompany them while adopting these technologies.