We’ve all heard that data is the new oil.
Over recent years, acting as a highly valuable commodity, the need for clean, accurate and accessible data has become a massive priority for virtually every industry.
And as businesses continue to collect and analyse data to inform decision making, the importance of data engineering has become central to all who wish to harness its value.
Especially for competitive advantage.
Check out these five reasons why your business should place focus on data engineering in 2023:
5. Improved Data Quality
Other than having a leg-up on the competition, productivity and efficiency take on a whole new form with AI, machine learning and automation.
But with disparate and broken datasets, making effective use of these booming technologies becomes a pertinent struggle.
Data engineering helps ensure that the data your business uses is accurate, consistent, and relevant.
By implementing processes for cleaning, transforming, and integrating data, data engineers help ensure that the data your business is relying on is of the highest quality.
Which becomes critical to making effective machine learning models and accurate predictions.
4. Better Decision Making
Data-driven decision making has fast become the new normal.
Now, there’s less room for instinct, gut-feelings and thumb-sucking where decisions are concerned. And with it, data acts central to guiding exponential growth success in our highly tech-driven world.
Data engineering allows businesses to gain insights from their data that can inform strategic decision making.
By organising and structuring data in a way that makes it easy to analyse, data engineers help business leaders make informed decisions based on data-driven insights. Not guessing games.
3. Increased Efficiency
How do you streamline your operations and processes if your biggest bottleneck is bad data?
Data engineering can help improve business operations by automating processes and integrating accurate and clean data from various sources.
Which will ultimately save time and resources, allowing your business to operate more efficiently.
One of the primary benefits of data engineering is its ability to streamline business operations. By automating processes and integrating data from various sources, data engineering can help save time and resources, allowing your business to operate more efficiently.
Two ways that data engineering can increase efficiency is through the use of data pipelines and data integration:
Data Pipelines:
A data pipeline is a series of processes that move data from one place to another.
Data engineers can design and implement data pipelines to automate the flow of data between different systems, such as databases and analytics platforms.
This can save time and resources by eliminating the need for manual data entry and transfer.
Data integration:
Data integration works by combining data from multiple sources into a single, cohesive dataset.
Which can help eliminate the need for the manual consolidation of data, enabling businesses to analyse data from a variety of sources in one place.
Overall, data engineering can help businesses operate more efficiently by automating processes and integrating data from various sources. By streamlining operations, data engineering can help businesses save time and resources and focus on more strategic tasks.
2. Enhanced Security:
Data security is a major concern for businesses of all sizes.
A data breach can have serious consequences, including financial losses, damage to reputation, and legal liability. Data engineering can help protect your business’s data by implementing security measures such as encryption and access controls.
Encryption is a method of encoding data so that it can only be accessed by authorised parties. Data engineers can help ensure that sensitive data is encrypted at rest (when it is stored) and in transit (when it is being transmitted).
This can help prevent unauthorised access to your business’s data.
Access controls are another important aspect of data security.
Data engineers can help implement measures such as user authentication, permissions, and auditing to ensure that only authorised personnel have access to sensitive data. This can help prevent data breaches caused by insider threats or unauthorised access.
Along with that, data engineers can also help implement disaster recovery and backup strategies to ensure that your business’s data is protected in the case of a catastrophic event.
Overall, data engineering plays a crucial role in helping businesses protect their data and avoid the potentially devastating consequences of a data breach.
1. Competitive Advantage:
Data quality is a crucial aspect of any data-driven business.
Poor quality data can lead to incorrect conclusions, wasted resources, and lost opportunities.
Data engineering helps ensure that the data your business is using is accurate, consistent, and relevant.
One way that data engineering can improve data quality is through the process of data cleaning. This involves identifying and correcting errors and inconsistencies in the data.
A data engineer might identify and remove duplicate records, fix formatting issues, or standardise data from different sources.
Another aspect of data engineering that can improve data quality is data transformation.
This involves manipulating the data to make it easier to work with and analyse. Which includes formatting data in a specific way, aggregating data from multiple sources, or creating derived data (such as calculating the average of a set of numbers).
Data integration is also an important aspect of data engineering that can help improve data quality.
Overall, data engineering plays a crucial role in ensuring that the data your business is using is of the highest quality.
By implementing processes for cleaning, transforming, and integrating data, data engineers can help ensure that your business is making informed decisions based on reliable data.
Data Engineering Is Crucial To A Successful Data Strategy.
By improving data quality, enabling better decision making, increasing efficiency, enhancing security, and providing a competitive advantage, data engineering can help your business thrive in the modern business landscape.
If your business is in need of data engineering wizardry, then look no further.
Our data engineering specialists have experience in a variety of sectors and industries (including aviation, banking and telecommunications) and are excited to work with you.
Get in touch, today!