A data lake solves the problem of having disparate data sources living in different applications, databases and other data silos. While traditional data warehouses brought data together into one place, they typically took quite a bit of time to build due to the complex data management operations required to transform the data as it was transferred into the on-premise infrastructure of the warehouse. This led to the development of the data lake – a quick and easy cloud-based solution for bringing data together into one place. Data lake popularity has climbed significantly since launch, as APIs quickly connect data sources to the data lake to bring data together. Data lakes have redefined ETL (extract, transform and load) as ELT, as data is quickly loaded and transforming it is left for later.

However, data in data lakes is not organized, connected, and made usable as a single source of truth. The problem with disparate data sources has only been moved to a different portion of the process. Data lakes do not automatically combine data from the multiple relocated sources together for analytics, reporting, and other uses. Data lakes lack data management, such as master data management, data quality, governance, and data accuracy technologies that produce trusted data available for use across an organization.

Solutions, such as the cloud-native AunsightTM Golden Record, bring data accuracy, matching, and merging to the lake. In this manner, data lakes can have the data management of data warehouses yet remain nimble as cloud solutions. Ultimately, the goal is to bring the data from the multiple data silos together for better analytics, accurate executive reporting, and customer 360 and product 360 views for better decision-making. This requires a data management solution that normalizes data of different forms and formats, to bring it into a single data model ready for dashboards, analytics, and queries. Pairing a data lake with a cloud-native data management solution with built in governance provides faster data integration success and analytics-ready data than traditional data warehouse technologies.

Aunsight Golden Record takes data lakes a step further by not only aggregating disparate data, but also cleansing data to reduce errors and matching and merging it together into a single source of accurate business information – giving you access to consistent trusted data across your organization in real-time.