Why do we need data integration?

We have highlighted many times how today’s world necessitates enterprises to be intelligent. This intelligence can only be established on the foundation of quality data that is managed systematically. Hybrid and heterogeneous information technology (IT) landscapes expose the usual challenge here because businesses need to bring together data from disparate sources in order to produce actionable insights.

Distributed data across several systems is one side of the story. With the recent advancements in the IT world, innovative businesses have a great appetite to exploit data that is sophisticated in many dimensions. In data science, these are formulated as the 5 V’s of big data: Volume, Variety, Velocity, Veracity, and Value, as represented in the following diagram:

Figure 8.1: The 5 V’s of big data

Figure 8.1 illustrates the 5 V’s of big data and provides brief examples. Although these dimensions...