What is a data lake?
Data lakes are large collections of data from many, and often dissimilar, sources that span an entire organization. For data lake creation, your data sources can include internet of things sensors or devices, website traffic, LinkedIn or Twitter activity, and enterprise sales.
The amount of data stored in data lakes is massive, sometimes reaching petabytes in volume. A data lake stores data in a more natural form, compared to a data mart. This helps in collecting data from various sources and structures. It’s important for an organization to properly establish and maintain its data lake, accounting for issues such as data lake governance, privacy and security.
What are the business benefits of a data lake?
Data lakes are becoming central to enterprise data strategies, regardless of the source or format. Data lake business benefits include:
- Addressing today’s huge data volumes and varieties, the growing expectations of users and the rapid globalization of economies.
- Removing the barriers separating all enterprise data and giving businesses the ability to bring all their siloed data together.
- Facilitating analysis of all data at once, without impediments.
- Providing a single, unified view of all data across the organization and the flexibility to access data in a variety of ways.
