Looking to incorporate more sustainable practices into your IT infrastructure? Data virtualization may be the answer for enterprises with massive technology footprints across power-hungry laptops, desktops, servers, and networks.
Data virtualization streamlines data access by integrating disparate data silos into a single virtual hub. It simplifies information delivery by providing business-friendly views that abstract away IT complexities. This agile approach to data engineering accelerates solution deployment, lowers costs, and ensures businesses have access to the most current and comprehensive information.
Copy less data and reduce storage
More data copies mean more storage, which in turn requires more power and larger infrastructure footprints. A more sustainable solution is to only copy the data you need and to regularly remove outdated information.
Compared to physical data consolidation, which utilizes ELT methods with numerous replicated copies, data virtualization offers a more effective approach to data integration. It’s a simple way to reduce the number of copies you need, thereby reducing the energy required to store all your copies in temporary staging areas, centralized data warehouses, or dependent data marts.
Optimize data queries for greater efficiency
Data fuels analytic insights—but some tools query data more efficiently than others. Inefficiently optimized queries require substantially more processing power, resulting in increased energy consumption. Generating 360-degree views often necessitates powerful tools, such as federated queries that span multiple systems. An example of this is searching across order management, sales, marketing, accounts receivable, and customer data warehouses for real-time order updates.
Data virtualization leverages cutting-edge optimization techniques and modern technology infrastructure to intelligently optimize queries, surpassing the efficiency of most analytics tools. This results in significant energy savings, particularly in large organizations that run thousands of daily queries. An additional advantage is cost reduction, particularly in cloud environments where you pay for incremental workload.
Retire personal data sets and fit-for-purpose data marts
Does your company frequently create custom data marts for specific business opportunities? Personal datasets and fit-for-purpose marts often persist and consume storage and backup resources—long after their business purpose has been fulfilled.
Data virtualization offers significant business advantages by providing reliable, consistent, and easily understandable datasets that are readily adopted by business users. These virtualized datasets promote reuse across various applications, minimizing the need for numerous individual datasets and specialized data marts.
For instance, you can leverage data virtualization to offer hundreds of standardized datasets to thousands of users. This would enable you to eliminate thousands of personal datasets and hundreds of smaller data marts, resulting in substantial savings in storage and energy costs.
Migrate to cloud solutions—faster
Major cloud providers offer solutions that are much more sustainable and at scale than what a traditional business can build on its own. Cloud providers optimize server performance and usage elastically in response to demand—often utilizing renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and hydroelectric power to deliver optimized performance.
Accelerate your sustainable IT success by migrating to the cloud sooner, leveraging its energy-saving benefits. However, be aware that repeated movement of data sources, processing, and applications can make the migration from on-premises to the cloud a painful and time-consuming process.
Luckily, data virtualization is a proven method for repeatable cloud migration, making it easier than ever to offload on-premises costs.
Data virtualization with Spotfire
Achieving sustainability is a universal goal for most companies seeking lasting success. Data virtualization is an easy choice for reducing storage and eliminating shadow IT costs. With several data virtualization options available with Spotfire, what are you waiting for? Learn more about the solution here.