What Are the Benefits of Data Discovery?
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2025 4:26 am
Data discovery tools help gain business insight by providing a complete picture of your data, enabling a big-picture view of the many data streams within your enterprise, and allowing you to uncover new insights while formulating solutions to their business challenges. It also makes data analytics understandable for stakeholders across the business, regardless of their level of data literacy.
Furthermore, data discovery helps businesses identify potential threats in their data so they can be more proactive in regard to risk management and data security. And it allows denmark whatsapp number data companies to apply specific real-time actions to the data they collect, ensuring it is stored and analyzed in accordance with organizational and legal guidelines, and that their data governance practices are secure and compliant.
Other benefits of data discovery tools include:
Empowering self-service discovery and automation, allowing users to easily find and leverage data without a dedicated support team.
Leveraging machine learning to gain a bird's eye view of your data assets as they scale, ensuring that your understanding adapts as your data evolves.
Surfacing the right information at the right time and drawing connections between data assets.
Enabling dynamic discovery and a high degree of reliability across your data infrastructure, regardless of the domain or location of data storage — data warehouse, data lake, data source, etc.
Process for data discovery
Whether performing manual data discovery or using more-advanced software for big data discovery, the process usually boils down to five steps:
Understanding what data is needed
Locating the sources that will provide that data
Setting up a search query within the data
Determining the relevance of data sources, eliminating irrelevant data, and refining search queries
Evaluating the quality of the results
Smart data discovery tools
Unfortunately, traditional data discovery methods, such as manual search and exploration, are often time-consuming, error-prone, and inefficient. As data volumes continue to grow exponentially, businesses need smarter approaches to uncover insights from their data quickly and accurately.
This is where smart data discovery comes into play.
According to Gartner, “smart data discovery” — “a next-generation data discovery capability that provides business users or citizen data scientists with insights from advanced analytics" — is the latest advancement in this arena.
Smart, or "automated" data discovery tools use advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to automatically identify, classify, and understand data assets within an organization's data landscape. These tools are designed to connect data from various sources, extract relevant information, and provide insights without human intervention. This type of smart data discovery makes it easier for businesses to access complex data sets, uncover data relationships, and identify patterns and trends.
In the past few years, this process has become significantly more efficient thanks to technological advances and the emergence of more-powerful artificial intelligence algorithms.
Data catalogs: The gateway to data discovery
Data catalogs serve as a central repository of metadata information about an organization's data assets. Crucial for establishing effective data management practices and implementing data governance strategies, they provide a searchable inventory of multiple sources, enabling users to quickly discover and understand available data assets. Modern data catalogs have evolved to incorporate automated data discovery capabilities, making it easier for organizations to implement data discovery at scale.
Put simply, a data catalog is the search engine for your company's data.
Furthermore, data discovery helps businesses identify potential threats in their data so they can be more proactive in regard to risk management and data security. And it allows denmark whatsapp number data companies to apply specific real-time actions to the data they collect, ensuring it is stored and analyzed in accordance with organizational and legal guidelines, and that their data governance practices are secure and compliant.
Other benefits of data discovery tools include:
Empowering self-service discovery and automation, allowing users to easily find and leverage data without a dedicated support team.
Leveraging machine learning to gain a bird's eye view of your data assets as they scale, ensuring that your understanding adapts as your data evolves.
Surfacing the right information at the right time and drawing connections between data assets.
Enabling dynamic discovery and a high degree of reliability across your data infrastructure, regardless of the domain or location of data storage — data warehouse, data lake, data source, etc.
Process for data discovery
Whether performing manual data discovery or using more-advanced software for big data discovery, the process usually boils down to five steps:
Understanding what data is needed
Locating the sources that will provide that data
Setting up a search query within the data
Determining the relevance of data sources, eliminating irrelevant data, and refining search queries
Evaluating the quality of the results
Smart data discovery tools
Unfortunately, traditional data discovery methods, such as manual search and exploration, are often time-consuming, error-prone, and inefficient. As data volumes continue to grow exponentially, businesses need smarter approaches to uncover insights from their data quickly and accurately.
This is where smart data discovery comes into play.
According to Gartner, “smart data discovery” — “a next-generation data discovery capability that provides business users or citizen data scientists with insights from advanced analytics" — is the latest advancement in this arena.
Smart, or "automated" data discovery tools use advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to automatically identify, classify, and understand data assets within an organization's data landscape. These tools are designed to connect data from various sources, extract relevant information, and provide insights without human intervention. This type of smart data discovery makes it easier for businesses to access complex data sets, uncover data relationships, and identify patterns and trends.
In the past few years, this process has become significantly more efficient thanks to technological advances and the emergence of more-powerful artificial intelligence algorithms.
Data catalogs: The gateway to data discovery
Data catalogs serve as a central repository of metadata information about an organization's data assets. Crucial for establishing effective data management practices and implementing data governance strategies, they provide a searchable inventory of multiple sources, enabling users to quickly discover and understand available data assets. Modern data catalogs have evolved to incorporate automated data discovery capabilities, making it easier for organizations to implement data discovery at scale.
Put simply, a data catalog is the search engine for your company's data.