As a business, do you know what your customers want from you? Are they content with the services and solutions you are offering them? What about the gaps in your business, and is there any way to fill those gaps? These are some of the most common questions every business owner asks themselves. To get answers to all these questions and many others, you need an Enterprise Data Warehouse.
An Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) is a perfect tool to answer any question you might have for your business. It is a way to use your business data from all channels and wield it as the most powerful analytics tool. An EDW allows you to use the data to analyze it and make informed decisions through deeper business insights and industry trends.
This explanation might seem familiar as it is pretty much how you define every data warehouse, but there’s more to an EDW than your average data warehouse. Let us understand what is an Enterprise Data Warehouse, along with its architecture and benefits.
What is Enterprise Data Warehouse?
Almost every data warehouse is used for data analytics to get deeper business insights which will help you make data-driven decisions. Well, if we talk about an Enterprise Data Warehouse, it’s like a regular data warehouse but much larger in scope as it handles a large organization’s data.
Imagine a small business uses a data warehouse to store its data. This data comes from various sources and multiple departments like sales, marketing, HR, and IT. For this, a simple data warehouse works fine, but if you have multiple businesses under a single organization, a simple data warehouse can no longer handle the toll all that data brings. Here is where EDW comes to the rescue.
An EDW will take information from various data sources and centralize it and stores it in a structured format. It doesn’t just store the current data of your business, but also the historical data. Users will be able to access the data in the form of charts, graphs, and dashboards to understand their business performance.
One of the major reasons for using an EDW is that it can manage huge amounts of data, which is common for a growing organization. As mentioned earlier, data comes from various sources. Some of those sources include Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.
Enterprise Data Warehouse Architecture
Since EDW has to manage and generate business intelligence reports from large data sets, it should be able to handle them. The major reason why it can handle that is because of enterprise data warehouse architecture. It is slightly different from the other data warehouses.
Here we’re going to discuss what an enterprise data warehouse architecture looks like. In case you want to check out the architecture of a usual data warehouse, read Types of Data Warehouse, Architecture & Differences With Database and Data Lake.
A data warehouse is a critical element of Business Intelligence (BI) structured with 4 different components mentioned below.
A data source layer
This layer is where the data extraction takes place. Be it internal or external sources.
A data staging area
This area stores the collected data temporarily, transforms it into a consistent format, and makes it available for further use.
Data storage layer
After formatting the data, it is centralized and stored here for further usage – reporting, analysis, or sharing.
Analytics & BI
The most important layer of EDW architecture, and is used for data querying by means of any tools.
What is the difference between a Data Warehouse and an Enterprise Data Warehouse?
It’s important that we understand the difference between a regular data warehouse and an enterprise data warehouse before moving forward. We’ve already discussed this in the earlier section, but here is a refresher. When we talk about a regular data warehouse, it isn’t just about data sets or information but something that is used for reporting and analysis. Now, you might be wondering what makes an EDW different.
It’s the architecture. The architecture of those data warehouses is the differentiating factor here. Data warehouses come in all shapes and sizes. EDWs though, are designed to be much larger and more versatile than your average data warehouse. They gather and store data from across all business units of an organization.
This means they extract and gather data from various departments and channels. This is used to meet the needs of multiple departments at once. Usually, a normal data warehouse would only handle the data from a single or maybe 2-3 businesses, but this one handles the data at the enterprise level. In simple terms, from way too many places. This makes them an essential tool for businesses that want to make the most of their data.
In case you are confused as to which data warehouse to go for, let us clear that up. It’s always best to choose EDW when you are a growing organization with a huge inflow of data. This is unless you’re a small business or a startup that doesn’t need too much analytics from its data.
Enterprise Data Warehouse Benefits
While there are a lot of enterprise data warehouse benefits, we picked a few of them that are worth discussing and listed them below.
You get real-time access to data
Accessing the data in real-time was difficult because EDW previously used the ETL approach, which is the extract, transform, and load. This method takes a lot of time and the data should first be transformed before it is loaded.
Now that EDW uses ELT, which is Extract, Load, and transform, data is first extracted and loaded directly without having to transform from its raw form. Since the raw data isn’t changed and transformed on an external server, it becomes quite easier to access data quickly in real-time.
Data security and compliance
Finding errors and fixing them in the data source is now easier with EDWs as you have the option to examine the data sources directly. Also, you don’t have to go through a long and complicated process to check multiple data locations. Why? Because you now have EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance enabled with the help of EDW.
Every business can benefit
It’s not just the sales or marketing team that can utilize the data from an EDW even departments can leverage it to their advantage. Imagine you’re running a grocery store. You can analyze which product it likely to sell more, and which isn’t. So, you can place the products accordingly for better visibility.
You understand your customers better
Data is power, which is very apt when you use EDW’s data-driven forecasting to scale your business. With EDW, you understand what your customers expect from your business and use predictive analysis to make informed decisions and improve your services. Then there’s also the scenario modeling features that works wonder for marketing campaigns. All this will help you grow your revenue substantially.
Some of these enterprise data warehouse benefits are how you can transform your business and scale it exponentially. You can learn about these benefits from this Salesforce article on the same.
Wrapping Up
In today’s world, digital transformation is the key to the success of an organization and that is only possible through data. That is if you know how to properly wield it. BPK Tech can help you leverage the power of data in the form of business intelligence through our expertise in Enterprise Data Warehouse solutions.
We at BPK Tech, develop, manage, and transform your business with both enterprise data warehousing and the usual data warehousing services. Our services work for various industries and all kinds of data warehouses, be it on-premises or cloud. Transform your business today with our data warehousing services: https://calendly.com/bpktech-advisors
