Data Warehouse: The First Step Towards Business Intelligence

Data Warehouses are the foundation for a successful BI platform. The concept behind data warehouse is to build a permanent centralized respository for current and historical data by collecting information from various data sources and transforming it to meaningful data. This data is required to support a company's analysis, comparison, reporting, and other BI functions & capabilities. 

The majority of organizations use software applications for operations or planning such as ERP, CRM, and Finance systems to manage their business. All such applications produce a large amount of data every day, and proper analysis of this data can provide valuable insight into business performance.   

How a Data Warehouse Benefits a Business 

Data warehouses offer the most reliable and accurate way for organizations to store and access structured data. They improve cross-organizational data access via reports, dashboards, and analytics tools and help businesses better monitor performance and improve decision-making through reliable data. Here's how having a data warehouse can benefit a business: 

• Facilitates Historical Insights into your Operations: Having a thorough understanding of the past successes and failures can help one create a forecast for the future. A data warehouse has a massive storage of historical data that can indicate different trends and analyses of the state of a business during different periods, allowing more accurate predictions and outcomes. The vast storage capacity of a data warehouse makes it easy to analyze various trends and time periods, which can help identify the current processes' strengths and flaws. A highly productive operation can be mirrored, while inefficient processes can be further analyzed and modified for a positive impact.  
• Improves Quality and Conformity of Data: Businesses generate and consume data from many different sources and in various forms. These data can be in a structured or unstructured format, making it challenging to analyze such data. Data warehouse converts all the collected data into consistent formats, as required by the selected analytics platforms. Moreover, to maintain this conformity, a data warehouse ensures that the data produced by different business divisions are of the same quality and standard – allowing a more efficient feed for analytics. 
• Enhances Efficiency: Gathering data from multiple sources can be a cumbersome task for a business user. With multiple systems and platforms being used to run the day-to-day operations of an organization, collecting data from all such systems can cost a lot of time and resources. Data Warehouse makes it possible to have all the data available from all sources in one place. This also makes it easy for users to quickly analyze and create reports from readily available data.   

• Improves Agility & Data Security: Unlike the traditional databases used earlier, today's data warehouse solutions are developed to support multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment. While most of the data warehouses are now fully cloud-based, even the on-premise data warehouses provide interoperability with the cloud-based infrastructure of an organization, thus providing enhanced agility and scalability. Moreover, data warehouses come with enhanced security techniques for blocking malicious codes and multi-level encryption to protect confidential data. The data warehouse also makes it easy to control user access by defining user groups based on roles, designation, etc. All this helps in improving the overall security of the organization's data.  
• Drastically Improves Data Analytics Capabilities: Data is the power source for a modern business. Business Intelligence and analytic solutions require uninterrupted access to standardized, high-quality data. A data warehouse adds the necessary fuel to BI, providing the much-needed competitive advantage to an organization while powering support for data-backed decision-making in real-time. A data warehouse is designed to handle massive levels of data and innumerable complex queries, making it a high-functioning essence of any business's data analytics system. 

 
As can be derived from the above benefits, a data warehouse allows a business to effectively design its operational strategy and make it possible to gain critical real-time insight into the current ongoings. The historical context of the data coupled with the quality and speed can drive smarter, metric-backed decision-making, leading to higher sales, more efficient processes, and tremendous competitive advantage.