Three Ways Business Intelligence Tech Is Accelerating Data Migration

"The Wire" is one of my favorite TV shows that I recently re-watched. The show depicts the inner workings of Baltimore's political institutions, law enforcement agencies, and criminal organizations, exposing the greed and corruption that existed at all levels throughout the city. During the re-watch, I was struck by the traditional methods used by law enforcement in the show, such as wiretapping and surveillance to gather information and intelligence on their targets. The methods were time-consuming, labor-intensive, and had a high margin of error.

This made me think about the evolution of data tools that we use day-to-day. At one point, everyone was gathering data manually and compiling it line-by-line in excel. But over time, we’ve shifted to more automation, giving us the ability to process more data and gather richer insights. In particular, today’s business intelligence (BI) technologies are becoming increasingly popular among asset managers as they provide a range of benefits that can help organizations better manage and understand their data. In this blog, I will discuss a few key advantages that these BI technologies provide to data migration projects with an emphasis on their ability to execute the migration with no code options and solutions for managing data migrations through online services and cloud storage capabilities.

1. No-Code ETL (Extract Transform and Load): Today’s (BI) technologies now offer various options for data migration that require little to no coding. This is accomplished by providing users with the ability to connect to a variety of data sources, such as large on-premises SQL databases, cloud-based data warehouses, NoSQL databases, and even flat files. Additionally, these solutions include user-friendly interfaces, such as drag-and-drop, for data integration and mapping, allowing business users to easily create connections between the source and target systems without requiring technical expertise or coding. In the case of a BI tool like Microsoft Power Query, users can transform data from a universe of sources, allowing for relationships and storage of both structured and unstructured data. Many BI tools also include pre-built data transformation and cleaning functions, such as converting data types, normalizing data, and validating data, which can automate data migration tasks and reduce the need for custom code.
2. Cloud-Based Data Management: BI solutions also provide advantages in their ability to manage data migrations through online services and cloud storage capabilities. This allows asset managers to easily scale their data migration efforts as needed and eliminates the need for expensive on-premises infrastructure. Additionally, using online services and cloud storage to execute data migrations can be cost-effective as it allows asset managers to pay for only the storage and compute resources required.
3. Data Governance: By leveraging BI technology’s data governance capabilities, such as data quality management, data lineage tracking, and data security and compliance features, it’s easier to understand where data came from, how it was transformed, and where it was loaded. BI tools offer the ability to automate the entire data migration process, from data extraction to data loading. In addition, these capabilities help organizations ensure that their data is reliable and can be trusted for decision-making.

In conclusion, business intelligence solutions provide a range of benefits that can help organizations better manage and understand their data. Utilizing no code options and managing data migration solutions through online services and cloud storage capabilities are just a few of the many advantages that BI technologies have to offer. Through the deployment of these capabilities, asset managers can streamline their data migration process, reduce the burden of complex coding, and ensure compliance with data governance policies.