As organizations grow and their needs become more and more complex and data-intensive, it is necessary for them to keep their data moving and in sync across their network environments. Real-time data replication solutions are proving to be boon for these businesses and agencies that are increasingly facing the aforementioned major challenges today.
In a nutshell, real-time data replication simply refers to the process of synchronizing data across multiple databases. When this happens, data is instantly copied to one or more locations at almost the same time that they are generated. While there is always a time delay between the moment the data are generated up to the moment they are copied, this “data latency” that tech experts refer to is often minimal when a powerful real-time data replication solution is used, resulting in a level of responsiveness that users will perceive as sufficiently instantaneous.
Before delving further into some of the benefits of real-time data replication, let us first look into some of the major data-related challenges that organizations face today.
Present-Day Challenges for Data-Driven Organizations
Keeping data in sync and integrated are among the most significant challenges being faced by organizations today. Moreover this is being exacerbated by a few major data trends that are unfolding even to this day. These data trends include the following:
Proliferating volumes of data. Whether it’s data produced by the world’s smartphones, by cloud computing, or next-generation smart technology networks like the Internet of Things, it is undeniable that data generation is reaching explosive levels of growth all over the world. In fact, some estimates have shown that humanity has produced more data in 2017 than in the last 5,000 years.
Increasing data sources in more locations. In the past, data warehouses were typically sourced from in-office enterprise resource planning systems, traditional applications, and conventional websites. While many organizations still use these legacy systems today, they are now also taking advantage of more data-intensive tools, including cloud-based programs and data centers that are located in many places around the world.
Growing number of data types. Not only are today’s organizations finding it challenging to store and process large volumes of data from diverse sources, now they are also having to deal with more data types and schemas. Whether it’s OLTP data from relational databases, columnar databases, Hadoop HDFS file system, No SQL databases, machine data, or some other type of data, making them readily accessible to users and applications across the enterprise is proving to be more demanding for many businesses and agencies today.
Why Real-Time Data Replication Matters
As previously mentioned, organizations today need a scalable solution that will allow them to simplify high-volume data movement. Whether they are adopting new computing technologies for data streaming, data storage, data analysis, or some other function, forward-looking enterprises and agencies can count on real-time data replication software solutions to make it easies for them to move or copy data across disparate databases and minimize the impact of the challenges pointed out above.
The right real-time data replication solution can be useful in many ways:
Network efficiency and compression. Most data replication solutions support network compression, and the right tool can be used to work well on network connections that perennially experience limited bandwidth and high latency.
Data integration for geographically distributed networks. Many organizations today, especially those with a global reach, often need to integrate data from numerous data centers across the globe. On top of this, many organizations also use the cloud as an additional data center. This cloud integration is a practice that calls for even greater network efficiency because bandwidth availability and network speed are not consistent all the time. It’s a set up that can really benefit from real-time data replication.
High-availability for data recovery and disruption prevention. In today’s real-time, data-first world, organizations face the ever-present threat of data loss due to system outages. Whether it is caused by human error, natural disasters, software problems, network interruptions, or malware, data loss can significantly impact an organization’s reputation and bottomline. With real-time data replication, businesses and agencies can transform into high-availability organizations with efficient standby environments specifically designed to prevent data loss.
Whatever the size of your organization and no matter what industry it belongs to, real-time data replication is a tool that you can harness to keep your business or agency running like clockwork. Don’t delay in exploring its benefits.
