An Insight Into Data Connectivity Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Data connectivity is the ability to connect one or more servers and clients so as to transfer huge volumes of data between them. Data connectivity and the demand for it has been changing the way we live and work. We dwell in a connected world in which data connectivity helps us communicate, conduct business, travel from one place to another and help us stay informed. The quest for using data effectively and innovatively has increased the need for reliable and robust data connectivity so that the enterprises can analyze the data and make intelligent business decisions when need be.

The evolving technologies such as 5G, virtual reality, artificial intelligence systems, robots, drones - all of these need better data connectivity. Albeit the fact that data connectivity is extremely important, it is complex and poses challenges aplenty. This article talks about data connectivity challenges and the strategies to overcome them.

Why Is Data Important?

Data is an integral part of today's digital world. You can take advantage of the right data to make better business decisions. Data is important for your business. Data helps businesses to find new customers, improve the chances of customer retention, improve processes, improve customer service, and predict sales trends.

Data Connectivity: Why Does It Matter?

The following are some of the ways data connectivity can help boost your business.

Business Collaboration - This is an area that has benefitted a lot over the past few years. You can now upload and download data and work on projects with your team members spread across the globe. Today's businesses need the right collaboration tools and high-speed connectivity to facilitate this collaboration. For this to be successful, you should select a connection provider who guarantees a low-latency, hassle-free, high bandwidth connection.

High Availability - Businesses should be able to communicate with their customers, clients and other stakeholders effectively. High availability is the key to success in this customer-centric business world. You should have connectivity that is resilient to outages.

Artificial Intelligence - The usage of machine learning and natural language processing to recognize complex patterns on huge amounts of data and then be able to come up with predictions has become widely popular. Applications that leverage AI should have access to high speed networks.

Massive Volumes of Data - To be successful, today's organizations should be able to handle huge amounts of data efficiently. Although many vendors claim that they can provide seamless connectivity of data, in reality, there are several challenges when connecting to massive volumes of data. In the real world, you would typically have to connect to a huge amount of data spread across several data sources. Each of these data sources might have different APIs, transfer limitations, etc.

Data Connectivity: Understanding the Challenges

The enterprises world-wide face massive data connection problems today - these problems are related to data fragmentation, quality of data and the volume of data. In today's world data connection matters, more than ever - whether your organization has data on-premise, in the cloud, or etc., you need uninterrupted data connectivity. Data connectivity presents multifaceted challenges and a lot of effort is needed to get it right.

Data being the crux of the business decisions in the enterprise, the need for data connectivity has grown leaps and bounds. In other words, data is extremely important to organizations and developers alike - they rely heavily on access to the right data. To build applications that take advantage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) or data analytics you need good data connectivity.

If you look just a couple of decades back, data connectivity was not too difficult since data was stored on premises and there were a few players in the arena. At that time, the organizations had monolithic data stores but as the number of data sources exploded, many different applications emerged to solve the challenges related to input and output of data. The organizations have to buy data solutions that are capable of managing data efficiently.

Internet of Things

Internet of Things - Internet of Things (IoT) or Machine to Machine (M2M) communication has gained momentum exponentially over the past few years. There has already been a surge in using IoT devices and this will continue in the near future as well. The Internet of Things has been transforming the way we live and work.

The advancements in data connectivity have opened the doors for opportunities - it has unlocked the many possibilities and opportunities IoT has to offer. The future of data connectivity is in enabling the Internet of Things.

Although data connectivity has improved over the years, it is still a challenge when implementing IoT - connecting to a large number of devices is one of the major challenges. In the near future when billions of devices will join the network in the cloud, we'll face massive connectivity challenges.

Security Challenges – Protecting the Data

You cannot run your business without access to data. However, the security of data should never be compromised. The enterprises should be able to provide their employees, client, and other stakeholders with secure access to critical data at a given point of time.

In the recent past, there have been incidents of data breach several times. Such data breaches in whatever way they happened are costly - detrimental to the organization's reputation and the customer's confidence. Modern security measures should be adopted to ensure that access to business-critical data is safe and secure.

High Speed Internet Access Using 5G

The much discussed and awaited 5G internet connectivity will have a major impact on the way we access the internet and work with data and date-driven applications. It is well set to replace the broadband connections we use at home primarily because it would reach speeds of 10 Gbps - around 100 times faster than 4G. Despite all the advantages 5G has to offer, there are several challenges.

When using 5G you would need frequency bands that have frequencies around 300GHz. Besides, you need the right infrastructure, money, device support, security, etc.

Data Consistency

Data consistency is a major challenge as well, especially when you are working with cloud-based distributed applications or microservices. When working with microservice-based applications, you might have to work with several different types of data sources. Since you have a conglomerate of data storage technologies, ensuring data consistency is not an easy task. There are several approaches that are followed to make sure that data is consistent - referential integrity is anyway ensured by the relational database management systems.

Optimal Performance

In today's connected world the need of the hour is fast access to data (even in massive data sets). Access to data should be fast and uninterrupted. Keeping pace with the increasing need of fast access to secure data is a challenge. Modern day applications need access to data at a very high speed. Performance and scalability of applications built using the modern-day tools and technologies must be at the very best.

Data Connectivity Solutions — Build or Buy?

In this section we'll examine when building a data connectivity solution is the correct choice and when buying one is a good choice. If your application supports a single data source you can build your own data connectivity solution. If you have the right resources to build a data connectivity solution in-house, go for it.

If your application supports several data sources buying a data connectivity solution is the right choice. You might often not want your resources to build data connectivity solutions but rather focus on delivering innovation that can add business value. In this case, you should buy a data connectivity solution as well.

Summary

In today's world, we need fast, reliable connectivity to get more done. Data matters much more than it did a couple of decades back. Whether you have your data in the cloud, on-premise, behind a firewall or etc., you should be able to provide uninterrupted real-time connectivity to the data. Needless to mention, you should make sure that your connectivity is secure as well so that you don't get attacked. Today's developers should be able to build robust applications that are fast and can work with massive datasets using the latest technologies.