The scale of the pool of information that today’s enterprises have at their disposal cannot be underestimated. With more feedback than ever coming from both consumer and business-to-business transactions, leveraging data into actionable insights is a huge challenge for organisations in any sector.

Furthermore, issues can be compounded when information is taken off-site or spread across a number internal locations.

The cloud model for enterprise data management has rapidly ascended from buzzword to industry standard in record time. However, having information asigned to many hosts and sources can present its own problems. In fact, many companies are still struggling to harness the power within their data, as pointed out in this telling statistic from IBM:

The real question that should be asked is: How can we combine our data and leverage it into better insights?

Well, the answer does, at least in part, lie in the cloud. Many organisations appear to have recognised that as fact and are ploughing a huge amount of resources into securing the best and most innovative solutions.

In fact, research from McKinsey & Company, citing figures collated by the International Data Corporation, explained that corporate spending on third-party-managed and public-cloud environments will grow to more than $70 billion by the end of 2015.

The barriers in amalgamating data

While aggregating data is a must in efforts to gain the best insights, the cloud is by no means foolproof. For example, if a company is looking to amalgamate information from a number of sources – be they in-house or off-site – the usefulness of heterogeneous data can be difficult to interpret.

There may be some sets of information that are usable, but they are often located on servers hosted by different vendors. The hybrid cloud-model can help here to an extent, but again it is by no means the be-all and end-all.

Self-reliance unlocks success

Ultimately, amalgamated information will be the most insightful to any enterprise. One of the best ways to ensure the organisation garners the ideal data for its decision making processes is by working in a level of self-service to company practices.

Gartner has predicted that increased self-reliance will enable companies to get the most from their data, and ultimately pour it back into the decision making process.

Businesses can benefit from improved data insights if they can find the best way to leverage information collectively.

“Self-service data integration will reduce the significant time and complexity users face in preparing their data for analysis and shift much of the activity from IT [solutions vendors] to the business,” explained Rita Sallam, research vice president with Gartner.

Ultimately, there’s no one simple way to unlock all of the potential within business data if it’s spread across a number of locations and solutions from different companies. However, all organisations should keep in mind that the transference of any data to information and consequently knowledge is one of the cornerstones of better business intelligence.