Data movement maturity: Is your data accessible enough?

There is immense pressure today to have access to meaningful data. Good data at your fingertips means you fully understand your customers, easily mitigate various types of risk and consistently respond to opportunities to innovate.

Getting that data means prioritizing gathering, moving, transforming and analyzing it in real time — and implementing these capabilities quickly and strategically to keep up with your competitors. In a recent report prepared for JSCAPE by Redwood, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) found that 72% of enterprises have already adopted real-time data integration.

Will your organization join them, or are you heading toward data stagnation?

A growing need for real-time data accessibility

To achieve your business goals and stay adaptable, you need to be able to make live decisions. If you can’t find accurate information (or any information) when you need it, you’re not just dealing with inconvenience. You’re facing potentially severe consequences.

Imagine a competitor launches a new product or you learn about a sudden regulatory change that requires an immediate shift. Without real-time data, you’re navigating in the dark, relying on outdated reports or incomplete information. Not only could you risk non-compliance, but your business could be fully ignored in an important moment because you have no answer prepared. Regardless of how good your strategy and team are, a lack of data could tie your hands and make it impossible to react with speed and precision to these types of changes.

Especially in a sector like finance, healthcare or manufacturing, a delayed response at a key decision point could leave you catching up indefinitely.

As your organization grows and your data volume increases, the complexity of managing that data also expands. Manual processes and outdated systems can make data more of a burden than an asset.

Elements of data movement maturity

Achieving mature data movement is crucial to ensuring your organization can make real-time decisions based on accurate, accessible and actionable information. Each element below plays a critical role in enabling this maturation.

Real-time data integration

The seamless flow of data between systems gives your stakeholders access to the most up-to-date information. You can streamline decision-making processes, enhance the customer experience (CX) and respond more effectively to market shifts.

This isn’t just about having the right tools in place — it’s about ensuring they can speak to one another well. No matter the quality of your data, if it lives in disconnected systems or tools, it won’t provide the insights you need. Instead, you’ll see gaps in data flow and/or duplicate records. 

How to achieve it? Consolidate the apps and tools you use in your data pipelines and ensure that they support end-to-end data automation across your entire infrastructure via built-in connectors and APIs. 

Consistent data governance and quality

A robust governance framework is a must if you want to remain confident that you’re entering, gathering, storing and maintaining data uniformly. Otherwise, there will always be a chance of errors and discrepancies contaminating your data. Without governance, your data can also become outdated or lost in the shuffle between systems and make it difficult to maintain compliance with industry regulations.

How to achieve it? Establish clear policies and data team roles. Implement cloud-based data solutions that monitor and enforce data consistency and security across all your systems.

Scalability and flexibility

Growth puts pressure on your data. More customer transactions, more complex supply chain data or larger datasets make it harder to process and move data efficiently. Scaling your data infrastructure along with your company size and use cases is critical for maintaining smooth operations into the future. Your data systems should be able to handle higher loads without sacrificing performance or speed.

It’s also necessary to adapt your data architecture over time without complete internal restructuring. Especially as you adopt new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning or advanced business intelligence tools, you may find you need different types of data processing and storage.

How to achieve it? Invest in a powerful combination of integrated workload automation and managed file transfer with modular automation design and scalable data management features.

Evaluate your current data flows

1. Check with key stakeholders. Start by engaging with the people who rely on data to do their jobs. Are they receiving the data they need when they need it? Understanding their pain points can help you identify where your data movement falls short.
2. Look for bottlenecks: Examine your current processes for slowdowns in import/export activities, extract, transform, load (ETL) processes or anywhere else that data moves through your organization. Are there specific people or machines causing delays?
3. Identify gaps in your workflows: Take a step back and map out how your data is supposed to move. Is reality aligned with the map, or are there gaps you need to address?

What does it look like to achieve high data availability?

Appriss Retail was exchanging data with its clients via a legacy application that was not easy to upgrade. As they began requiring large volumes of file transfers, the team needed an efficient solution for handling them while protecting personally identifiable information (PII).

With JSCAPE MFT Server and MFT Gateway, Appriss Retail configured file transfer processes with high availability, plus automated threat mitigation, multiple protocol support and more. Read the full story.

Make your data actionable

Effective data management is more than simply collecting information. Clean, reliable and accessible data can generate a significant competitive advantage in a world where organizations are trying to keep up with new data requirements, rapidly increasing data volume and the arrival of big data.

To dive deeper into how (and why) to mature your data movement processes using an MFT solution with a SaaS option, read Data in Motion, our in-depth report on enterprise data movement. Learn about the impact of multi-cloud environments, workload automation, data volume and complexity when adapting your data movement strategy.