Data Virtualisation for Agile Data Provisioning
Date:
By: Philip Howard
Classification: White Paper
The capabilities of Data Virtualisation meet our requirements for agile data provisioning: to access any data, regardless of its format, in any combination, with minimal latency.
Apart from this flexibility of access the other great virtues of Data Vir- tualisation are that it a) presents all results in a consistent format, b) hides the complexity of the environment from the user, and c) isolates the data storage layer of the enterprise architecture from higher level considerations, so that either one can be changed without impacting on the other.
Of course, Data Virtualisation is not a panacea: there are times when using MDM or a traditional data integration tool like ETL, for example, may be more appropriate than employing Data Virtualisation. However, Data Virtualisation also complements these approaches, just as it complements other technologies such as SOA, B2B, data warehousing and business intelligence tools.
The bottom line is that it is difficult to think of any enterprise that could not profitably use Data Virtualisation in one scenario or another and, quite possibly, to support multiple use cases. Therefore, we recommend that you start by leveraging the use cases in this paper as well as the resources of best-of-breed vendors to identify projects in your enterprise that can take advantage of Data Virtualisation.