Today’s businesses need to share and manage information effectively to gain competitive advantages. Their capability to support mobile and remote workers is becoming increasingly vital since the decentralization of work with remote, home and branch office is trend. It is essential to make information available whenever needed.
Data synchronization is an innovate approach to create consistency and continuous harmonization of all shared system data over time. The main goal is to sustain data reliability of several applications and databases and to get precise and dependable data across different operational and transactional systems using continuous, on-demand or on-a-schedule synchronization methods.
The basic data synchronization process contains five stages:
- Data extraction from the master/source system
- Data transfer
- Data transformation
- Data transmission
- Data down-load to target systems
Each of these phases impact performances and need to be cautiously planned to avoid system slow-down and failure.
Efficient and reliable data synchronization process implementation is facing several challenges that include:
- Real-timeliness: Data synchronization aims establishing low latency processes. It is critical to limit the handled data volumes to diminish processing time. Using automating integration processes help improve the operational effectiveness and real-time data transmission.
- Data Formats Complexity: System data structures differ broadly frequently merging legacy systems, packaged applications, files, mainframes etc. that require extensive in sync maintenance. Managing numerous data formats and interfaces involves complex mappings between sources and targets, aggregations, calculations and more.
- Security and Maintenance: Various systems have different security and privacy policies that must be enforced on the different target systems to prevent potential abuse of information especially when handling personal information or any kind of confidential data under Non-Disclosure-Agreement (NDA).
Data transfers and intermediate results of data transmissions must be encrypted. Data outside the firewall (e.g. Salesforce) need to be securely handled.
In addition, data synchronization needs to be stringently monitored to guarantee that it is properly running, errors are handled correctly and security vulnerabilities are detected and mitigated.
Whether it is customer relationship management (CRM), eCommerce, Salesforce, enterprise resource planning (ERP), accounting, updating shipping information or other cloud and on-premise applications, with data synchronization, companies can make sure that critical data is reliable across different systems at any kind of devices such as laptop, office desktop, smartphone or other Portable Digital Assistant (PDA) that are connected into the corporate networks through virtual private network (VPN) connections, web servers and other connections.
