Data Management Basics: What Every Business Needs to Know

Data is the foundation of any project. All work processes depend on how they’re organized and processed. Get it right and watch your business grow. Let’s dive deeper into this issue and discover some key points about data management organization for different businesses, its technical side, and how to manage it in the right way.

What is data management?

Data management is a complex process that covers the collection, storage, organization, and use of data to ensure its availability, reliability, and security. As a whole, this involves creating and maintaining databases, protecting internal information, and managing its quality.

Let’s simplify this definition. Imagine a home library with thousands of books. Having chaos and no order makes it hard to find the book you’re looking for. In this case, data management is the organization of your library, where each book is in its place, classified by a specific genre, year, or author. Do you see now how important data management is even in everyday life?

Today, data volumes are growing rapidly, so competent data management is a prerequisite for stable business development and adaptation to new challenges. It’s a strategic asset that will significantly increase the company’s efficiency and competitiveness in your industry. Focus on this point and make all the workflows go in the right way.

Types of data management

Since you already understand what data management is, it’s time to talk about its types. We’ve already said that working with data includes collecting, processing, verifying, and analyzing data processes. Basically, these are all types of data management. Let’s go over each one.

• Data collection and integration: This is the process of collecting data from different and relevant sources and combining them into a single, convenient system for further use.
• Data storage: Organizing storage facilities, such as databases and cloud platforms, to provide reliable and fast access to information.
• Data processing and analysis: It’s simple here. It’s when you process the information you collect to get insights that help you decide what to do. You check if the data is up-to-date, outdated, or needs to be replaced.
• Data protection and security: It’s everything you do to prevent loss, unauthorized access, and cyberattacks.
• Data quality control: It’s checking and ensuring actions that data is accurate and up-to-date. If the information is outdated, it must be replaced so that further work is based only on reliable data. 
• Metadata management: This is a set of actions with all the databases you have: creating, moving, deleting, replacing, etc. Based on this, data about the changes made is created, which helps to find them faster and organize information.
• Data archiving and deletion: Ensuring that data is properly stored in the long term or deleted when it’s no longer relevant in accordance with company policies.

As a rule, companies use all types of data management. For their effective use and convenient work with them, they need to be updated, constantly checked, and some deleted, because their relevance also has expiration dates.

What makes data management so important for business?

Data drives the world and companies. First and foremost, it’s key to making informed business decisions that will have an impact on the future work of all the company departments. Therefore, data management should be an integral part of both internal processes and digital product development.

If you have well-organized data management, you can easily and efficiently analyze markets, understand customer behavior, optimize internal processes, and increase the efficiency of any product. That’s a lot of advantages, right? If we take logistics as an example, data management is a vital process there. Imagine how many supply chains, goods tracking, and organization of warehouses are subject to the data management process. Basically, this is what keeps the business running. 

Data management also ensures compliance with regulatory requirements and helps to avoid financial losses due to mistakes or poor-quality data. That’s why we emphasized the need to check and update data in the previous section. In addition, effective data management contributes to a powerful competitive advantage, as it lets companies adapt to market changes faster and better predict future trends. Why? Because with up-to-date data, you’ll always be one step ahead of the rest of your industry.

The technical side of data management

You, as a business, should be aware of certain tools and technologies when it comes to data management. They help you collect, process, and analyze all the data that is relevant to you at the moment. The main ones include the following.

• Databases: Storing and organizing large amounts of information can be done using both relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) databases. For example, a good choice would be around such databases as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis. It’s up to you what to choose.
• Cloud platforms: This is a way to store data in a kind of digital cloud, which gives you fast access, scalability, and flexibility. Like everything you need right now in one place. We suggest testing such platforms as Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage.
• Tools for working with big data: If you’re a company with thousands or hundreds of thousands of databases, you’ll need the right tools. Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark will help you with distributed processing of large amounts of data. Moreover, they will help you to keep all the data in a well-organized way.
• ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools: Basically, they extract data, transform it, and load it into the company’s internal systems. Talend, Informatica, and Apache NiFi tools will help you with that. Choose what fits you better.
• Tools for analytics checking & visualization: Every business is pretty sure that in this way and with these tools you can make decisions easier. Tableau, Power BI, and Apache Superset can help you create reports and visualize all the data you collect. They also present all the valuable insights in a convenient and visually pleasing way. It’s a good option when you need to show the report to partners. 
• Tools for data security: They are technical measures, like encryption, access control, and backups, that make sure your data stays protected. We recommend using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption algorithms and Veeam and Acronis tools. They’ll assist you in backing up your data and restoring it in case you lose it or the system shows some failures.

Tools and technologies make life much easier for companies when it comes to data management software solutions. Try out our tools to make data management easier and more impactful.

What’s the best way to manage data for a specific project?

In fact, with a clear action plan, you can successfully manage any data. First of all, those that have a key importance to develop a new product. So, where to start?

Start with planning and goal setting. This stage is relevant for starting any business. Draw a roadmap and follow it with confidence. In other words, develop a clear action plan, make a list of data to be collected, determine where to store it, and provide the necessary access.

When all the data is collected, select the appropriate tools for processing and storing it, such as relational or non-relational databases, analytics systems, or data exchange platforms. After that, structure all the information. That is, arrange the books in your library alphabetically with a clear hierarchy. This way you will know exactly where everything is.

Now it’s time to determine who will have access rights to your data. First of all, give them to the teams working on the current project and other team members who need them to work. At the same time, set up access levels to the data to ensure that it’s protected and prevent unauthorized access. Alternatively, this could be encryption or authentication tools.

Next, take care of procedures for verifying the accuracy and completeness of the collected data. Regular monitoring will help you avoid mistakes and build further work on relevant and valid information. Another important point is to back up your data. This is necessary to protect them from possible losses or system failures. As a final step here, keep detailed documentation of all data management processes. This way, you can see the whole situation and integrate new team members faster.

To organize data management in the best way possible, automate most of the processes. This will reduce manual work and speed up the overall project development time. Take these steps to make sure your data is secure, quality, and managed effectively within a project.

In what ways can businesses use data management?

On the whole, businesses can use data management in many ways. After all, data is used in every business process and needs to be tracked and verified. So, here are the main areas where businesses can use data management solutions to significantly speed up and improve the company’s work.

• Making informed decisions: This is an extremely important area because the company’s future activities depend on the correctness of its organization. Data analysis helps businesses to better understand the modern market needs and current trends, which lets them make more informed decisions based on real information.
• Personalization of customer service: Data management helps you collect information about customer preferences and needs. You can then create personalized offers and improve customer service.
• Optimization of operational processes: Proper data management helps you identify inefficient processes and optimize them accordingly. This step will reduce costs and increase the productivity of the company’s departments.
• Improving marketing campaigns: Data analytics allows businesses to better understand which promotion channels and strategies work best today. Then you can direct resources to the most effective promotion methods and learn new ones.
• Risk management: Data helps businesses identify potential threats and anticipate possible risks. Based on the collected data, companies can develop strategies to minimize negative consequences and stay up to date with the company’s current affairs.
• Innovation and product development: With data, companies can study customer feedback and analyze behavioral patterns. Data like this helps create new and better products and services that meet the market’s needs.

Depending on your business goals and direction, you can choose your own way of using data management as a powerful tool. However, the points we’ve listed can be applicable to different areas and industries at the same time. Choose the one that is most relevant to your business development and business processes.

How will data management go if it’s not organized?

As we said earlier, data that is not properly organized leads to general chaos. You can get into a lot of issues if you don’t pay attention to this and manage all the data the right way.

First, you can lose your data. This possibility exists due to mistakes, system failures, or lack of backups. So think about your data protection plans in advance. Also, the data collected may be inaccurate or outdated, which also negatively affects decision-making and leads to incorrect conclusions.

When data is stored in different formats or is not properly integrated, it makes it difficult to analyze and use for strategic planning. The lack of a clear organization of data management can increase the risk of unauthorized access to data as well.

Without a clear data structure, employees will spend more time searching for and checking the information. This will delay the fulfillment of internal tasks and affect the overall team efficiency. It will also be difficult for teams to share information and collaborate productively when there is no clearly organized data.

And of course, disorganized data management can lead to mistakes in business processes that will cost the company additional resources to correct and compensate.

In fact, you can find an adequate solution to each of the above issues if you plan ahead. Write down your roadmap and follow it, remember? So don’t think about the negative consequences of losing your data. Instead, plan actions to protect it and work on strategically important tasks for the company.

Technical points from TRIARE experts about data management

Working with data is always a responsible and painstaking task. With many years of experience in creating digital products, we know how to work with databases and how to set up the entire project process. That’s why we have these data management tips. Take advantage of them and reap the rewards.

• Use structured databases (SQL, NoSQL) for easy organization and quick access to information. This is the first thing to do when you have collected information and need to organize it properly. 
• Use modern data encryption methods (AES, RSA) and multi-level authentication to protect against unauthorized access. Data security is the most important thing here. So, make access restricted for unauthorized persons and implement different access levels for the teams that work with them.
• Automate backups to avoid data loss due to system failures or attacks.
• Add real-time data monitoring systems to track changes and respond quickly to any system anomalies.
• Integrate tools for automated data collection, transformation, and loading into various systems, such as Talend and Apache NiFi.
• Use cloud platforms (AWS, Google Cloud) to store large amounts of data and process it with access from anywhere in the world.
• Conduct systematic data checks to ensure its accuracy and relevance.

Using these methods, your business will have reliable and efficient data management, which is key to company success. Our TRIARE team will be happy to be your trusted partner and help you organize all your data to keep everything running at the speed of light.

 Conclusion

Data drives the world and companies. This is why it’s important to collect, store, and process them correctly. If you do everything right at the start of a new project, your efficiency will exceed all expectations. 

To get to your goals faster, our TRIARE experts will help you with data management, assist you with database management on ongoing projects, and provide technical support at every stage of cooperation.