You have reams of data few people have looked at, no time allocated to clean it and not enough space to store it. Does this sound familiar? If you own or work in a small, growing company, these may be challenges you face every day, and they are only going to become bigger as your company expands. To counter this trend, data deduplication will streamline your data stores and make your operation leaner.
The Data Explosion
Data is growing exponentially every day. Data doubles every two years, and by the year 2020, experts believe that man will have created 44 zettabytes of data – that is the equivalent of 44 trillion gigabytes. You have probably experienced this yourself. As you grow, increasing amounts of data pour into your firm, making it harder to make sense of it.
Data Deduplication
One effective method to make your data more manageable is data deduplication. Duplicate data refers to multiple records in your database that all refer to the same data entity.
Maybe a customer filled out your contact card at a trade show as “John Doe,” and signed up for your email newsletter from your site as “John Q. Doe.” These duplicate records take up space, slow down data operations, add to the cost of data transmission and can wreak havoc with your marketing and customer service programs.
Entity Resolution
Customer deduplication software uses entity matching tools to resolve these differences into a single entity. These tools also tackle other forms of bad data:
- Invalid: Data with incorrect characters.
- Incomplete: Data missing vital inputs.
- Unsynchronized: Data not synchronized properly to the master system.
- Conflicting: Otherwise matching data with different phone numbers or addresses, for example.
You can see that as you grow, these problems only multiply. Entity matching tools create a single view of each customer, keep fragmented records until they can be reconciled, locate sources of bad data collection, and build a holistic view of your data over time.
Data Overwhelm
Although IDC research firm estimates the worldwide market for big data at $136 billion dollars per year, IBM estimates the cost of bad data to be $3.1 trillion for 2016 in the US alone. Although not a direct comparison, these numbers reflect the alarming need for better data at companies across the board. Data deduplication will help keep your company’s data lean and manageable.
Searching for better entity resolution software? HiPER from Black Oak Analytics is a proprietary solution that many firms rely to harness the power of their data. Fore more information contact us today!