Big data virtualization helps businesses to analyze the increasing amount of big data they have at their disposal. Unless it is analyzed, put in forms that can be understood by business leaders and then applied to the market – it becomes of questionable use.
According to a recent report from the Smart Data Collective virtualization lets businesses get increased “agility in handling and analyzing the data they’re collecting. Data virtualization basically gives businesses almost instant access to as much data as they want in whatever form they want.”
As an added plus, big data virtualization lets an application “retrieve and manipulate data without needing to know how the data is stored or formatted,” the report said. Other benefits include a reduced risk of data errors; the prevention of data failure or corruption; and quicker processing for data analysis, the report added.
In addition, data virtualization makes sure data are “well integrated with other systems so that enterprises can harness big data for analytics and operations,” Suresh Chandrasekaran, senior vice president, North America, Denodo Technologies, wrote on DataInformed.com. A Forrester (News - Alert) Research report, “Data Virtualization Reaches Critical Mass,” also found that “integration of big data expands the potential for business insight.”
To see the marketplace response to the new big data virtualization trend, just look at the announcement recently that SAS (News - Alert) Federation Server will ship this quarter with big data virtualization.
It gives access to big data stores on Hadoop, SAP HANA, Oracle (News - Alert), and DB2, according to a statement from SAS. “This data-as-a-service approach provides easily consumable access to shared, secure enterprise data to speed and simplify data preparation. SAS has also beefed up security, data masking and data governance within SAS Federation Server to ensure proper policies, access and restrictions for sensitive data,” SAS added.
In addition, Virtualization Review cited recent statements from SAS which said that, “data virtualization technologies provide the ability to view data from multiple sources through an integrated, virtual data view."
“While the data remains stored in original sources, multiple systems can 'see' integrated data that appears as a single view. Organizations often implement [Master Data Management] and data federation technologies in isolation, without regard to the potential power of using them in tandem," the statement adds.
In a related trend, CSC (News - Alert) predicted that this year new big data infrastructure found at many companies will be put to use. “Given the explosion in the amount of data, businesses will increasingly want to analyze that data to make better decisions,” according to a recent article from TMCnet. “It is especially useful when businesses want to spot trends in a market, about their customers, or even about the company itself.”
Edited by Alisen Downey