In the midst of the growing digital demands of customers, organizations are feeling more pressure than ever to modernize their practices.

With this, there has been a rising need for companies to automate everyday business processes in order to keep up in today’s increasingly competitive landscape.   

According to Noel Yuhanna, VP principal analyst at Forrester, the automation of data management can be useful for organizations looking to maintain that competitive edge because of the countless benefits that it offers.

He said, “Automation is helping to improve the bottom line, which means revenue will increase, the customer experience and satisfaction will improve, there’s a better understanding of who is buying what products and what services and it also gives a better understanding of what the business can do better.”

Yuhanna explained that one area he has seen lacking is the availability of real-time data. He said that, up until recently, systems have been built on slow-moving, batch-oriented data that can slow businesses down as they try to innovate.

According to Yuhanna, one way automation being used is to load or move data from one location to another or to load it into a certain platform. 

“But there is also automation around the processing of data itself,” Yuhanna said. “It really depends on the degree of automation… It’s a more generalized term, but it is happening for all of these data management functions, whether it is data ingestion or transformation or governance or security or quality… Most of what we’re seeing is to improve these processes.”

He went on to say that many of these processes are things that have always been done manually and are areas that have remained stagnant in the industry for the last several years. 

“When it comes to query tuning or optimization or back up recovery of data or anything around performance and scale, these functions are all being automated,” Yuhanna said. 

However, he emphasized that just because automation is successfully occurring, that doesn’t mean it is perfect. In fact, he predicted that automation for data management is a field that will continue to grow and improve for at least another decade. 

“We have probably completed about 20% of that journey at the moment,” Yuhanna said. “Data management is complex… Every organization on the planet has more than two dozen data management tools and none of these tools talk to each other… So, what we really need is a solution that can blend all of these things together.”

Data management company Melissa is working to do this with its host of solutions aimed at helping companies to achieve full spectrum data quality. 

Melissa’s Automated FTP Data Processing Services can help companies that receive data on a regularly scheduled basis, whether that be hourly, daily, or weekly. 

With this, customers gain access to Melissa’s safe and secure FTP servers for data enhancement and hygiene services. These services are available 24/7 and work to eliminate the need to wait for batch processing.

Benefits of the Automated FTP Data Processing Services include 

  • Fast, real-time data cleansing 
  • Subscription levels for all business cases (100,000 to 1 billion + records)  
  • Easy set up of data source locations and formats so users can post several files in multiple formats at their convenience

To learn more about Melissa’s Automated FTP Data Processing Services, visit the website.