Introduction to Unified Data 

Unified data brings together different data sources to offer one view of an organization’s data. This term frequently refers to a grouping of on-prem and cloud-based data that can be virtualized through a unified layer.

Why Is Unified Data Essential for an Organization?

Unified data offers a comprehensive, safe and accurate picture of the happenings in a business by enabling business intelligence analysts and teams to perform more granular and robust analysis. Unified data can help data scientists and business users to swiftly build and run queries to access all the data they require without complicated resource-intensive IT requests or SQL scripts.

How does Data Unification Work with Hybrid Cloud Environments?

The idea of the hybrid cloud is described by various cloud platforms and on-prem databases present within the same company. Some organizations can store data on six or even more cloud platforms and various on-prem databases, some transactional or relational. On being considered individually, these databases do not depict a company’s sales, customers or other activities accurately and therefore cannot be analyzed efficiently.

How can Data Unification Help with Seamless Shopping Experiences for Customers?

Data unification a trending topic for merchants. Before the pandemic resulted in the increase in online shopping and omnichannel experiences, such as curb side pickup, more than 80 percent of brands that were surveyed by Futurum and SAS in 2019 were already planning to begin the process of unifying their customer data in the cloud or had already started the process. Since then, the requirement for real-time alignment of data across locations and channels has only increased.

Why is Data Unification Such a Trend?

A single data source can maintain and support a better operational efficiency, more precise fraud protection and more accurate and reliable brand personalization. All of these factors can positively affect a customer’s experience, and that is crucial as customer expectations are higher now. So how can data unification help one do better?

• Make sure customers can get the items they have ordered: Unified data can help with retailers’ websites to keep up with fluctuating inventory locations and stock levels. Unified data also makes it much easier for employees to perform their tasks, as they can find the right items at the right time, respond to customer service inquiries with good information and spend much less time dealing with the consequences of missing or outdated data.
• Improve fraud screening accuracy: Data unification also plays an essential role in preventing fraud. Order screening and marketing depend on data to get the job done. When a company uses two different datasets for such tasks there could be some mistakes at the time of checking out the items at the website.
• Keep up with changing customer behavior and circumstances: Salesforce found in 2020 that almost 66% of customers assume companies to “understand their individual needs and expectations,” and unified data this easy as the customer behaviour pattern changes.
• Offer a reliable and tailored customer service: Unified data can help companies to connect their customers to the products that they have in stock, get the customers through checkout quickly, keep up with the changes in their lives for better, assist with more sympathetic messaging and make it easier for the front-line employees to provide an excellent service.

Conclusion

So, what is the future of unified data? Unifying data will allow organizations to integrate more complete sets of data into their AI and BI tools. Thus, this will result in more complete and robust outputs. Even the most sophisticated tools can only work when high quality data provides their fuel.