What Is Data Virtualization?

As the volume of data owned by enterprises increases, data management, processing, and access processes become cumbersome in a sense, leading to time and cost losses proportional to the size of the data. With the advantages it offers to enterprises in terms of speed, flexibility, security, and compatibility with cloud and hybrid architectures, data virtualization has become a preferred method in data management processes.

Data virtualization is a data abstraction process that enables enterprises to manage their data management processes effectively. More clearly, data virtualization is a form of data management that allows data collected from various and structurally different sources to be brought together under a single access point. By integrating all corporate data stored in different systems, managing unified data for centralized security and governance, and creating a logical data layer that presents this data to business users in real time, data virtualization offers a modern approach to data integration.

The main objective of data virtualization is to create a data management system that allows data to be retrieved and processed by a wide variety of user platforms by building a bridge between multiple data sources—without copying or moving the data and regardless of how the data is formatted or where it is physically stored.

Why Data Virtualization?

Providing a unique approach to data integration and management, data virtualization goes beyond simple data access and acts as a fully featured data discovery and search system along with data security. While hiding the complexity of accessing data, data virtualization performs instant data transformation and aggregation since it does not need to collect data in a separate repository to convert it into the target format. Because it connects to underlying data sources in real time, it delivers the most up-to-date data to business users within their applications, offering an agile and simple approach.

Examples of the benefits that data virtualization offers to organizations include:

Transition from legacy systems to modern cloud architectures: With its ability to abstract underlying systems, data virtualization enables legacy systems to be replaced with modern cloud applications.

Data integrity and security through isolation: By isolating critical data sources from users and applications, it prevents data from being modified unintentionally or in an uncontrolled manner.

Fast and low-cost data access: Thanks to its zero-replication approach, data virtualization allows organizations to quickly access accurate data without making additional storage investments.

Real-time data delivery: It ensures that users can access the most up-to-date data during their daily operations. Savings in resource utilization: With its simple, view-based approach, data virtualization reduces the time and human resources used for development by approximately one quarter.

Centralized data governance and security: With a single virtual data structure, data virtualization enables the implementation of centralized data governance and security.

Single source of truth: Data is shaped and prepared according to user requests, and through the “Single Source of Truth” principle, it ensures consistency of information obtained from different user groups or platforms.

Flexible data architecture: Since data models are designed on a virtual platform, changes over time in source systems or user platforms do not affect the data modeling structure. As a result, processes such as technology upgrades, data migration, and adaptation to new systems do not pose a problem even for organizations with the largest data storage and processing capacities.

Future Projection of Data Virtualization Operations

Data virtualization operations enable enterprises to save costs while optimizing their operational processes. They contribute to fast and real-time decision-making, ensuring security through authorization and access controls, and improving business performance. In addition, they enable risks to be analyzed and mitigated effectively.

Although the benefits offered by data virtualization do not end here, it can already be predicted that in the near future it will become a strategic data layer that not only contributes to business processes but also directly affects an organization’s agility, speed, and competitiveness. Advanced data virtualization operations such as AI-powered data virtualization, real-time and event-based data access, multi-cloud-compatible structures, enhanced data security and governance, and the integrated operation of data warehouses and data lakes have already begun to be implemented.

For detailed information about Kafein Technology’s Data Virtualization Consulting service, click here.