The Data Integration Life Cycle

Your IT organization needs a better way to get more out of your existing systems and applications. You need to harness the data locked within them.

Traditional data integration approaches aren’t working. You need to streamline processes. You need to make the most of limited resources. And you need to reduce the costs associated with infrastructure, development, support, maintenance, and change management.

Data integration requires an ongoing, iterative approach. The Informatica Platform supports all five steps in the data integration life cycle.

1. Access
All data must be accessed, regardless of its source or structure. Data must be extracted from arcane mainframe systems, as well as from relational databases, applications, XML, messages, and even documents such as spreadsheets.

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Informatica PowerExchange
Informatica B2B Data Exchange
Informatica Cloud

2. Discover
Data sources—particularly poorly documented or unknown sources—must be profiled to understand their content and structure. Patterns and rules implicit in the data must be inferred. Potential data quality issues must be flagged.

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Informatica Data Explorer
Informatica Cloud

3. Cleanse
Data must be cleansed to ensure its quality, accuracy, and completeness. Errors or omissions must be addressed. Data standards must be enforced, and values must be validated. Duplicate data entries must be eliminated.

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Informatica Data Quality
Informatica Identity Resolution
Informatica Cloud

4. Integrate
To maintain a consistent view of data across all systems, data must be integrated and transformed to reconcile discrepancies in the way different systems define and structure various data elements.
For example, the marketing and finance systems may have completely different business definitions and data formats for “customer profitability,” and these differences require resolution.

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Informatica PowerCenter
Informatica Cloud

5. Deliver
The right data must be delivered in the right format, at the right time, to all the applications and users that need it. Delivering data can range from a single data element or record in support of a real-time business operation to millions of records for trend analysis and enterprise reporting. It also involves delivering inactive data to archives/history databases and provisioning masked subsets of production data for non-production systems. Data must be both highly available and secure in its delivery.

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Informatica PowerExchange
Informatica B2B Data Exchange
Informatica Data Archive
Informatica Data Privacy
Informatica Data Subset
Informatica Cloud

Audit, Manage, and Monitor

Data stewards and IT administrators need to collaborate to audit, manage, and monitor data. Key metrics, such as data quality, are constantly measured with an eye toward steady improvement over time. The goal is to track progress on key data attributes and flag any new issues for resolution and continual improvement once data is fed back into the data integration life cycle.

The Informatica Platform provides shared metadata to document where your data is, as well as the business rules and logic associated with your data. The Platform shows the impact of potential changes, which helps all roles respond more quickly and cost-effectively to change.

Define, Design, and Develop

Business analysts, data architects, and IT developers need a powerful set of tools to help them collaborate on defining, designing, and developing data integration rules and processes.

The Informatica Platform includes common set of integrated tools to make sure all people are working together effectively. The Platform also ensures that metadata is shared and consistent across all data integration roles.