by Angela Guess
Ravi Shankar recently wrote an article for Cloud Times regarding the importance of MDM to successful cloud computing. He writes, “Without cloud-enabled master data management (MDM), the idea of Data as a Service (DaaS) is a hollow promise. Companies turned successfully to MDM to deal with fragmented data in the past in order to reconcile duplicate data, dump outdated data and create centralized, trustworthy business views across disparate on-premise systems. If anything, MDM is even more important for applications that run in the cloud. With DaaS, it doesn’t matter where the data physically resides, it is simply delivered as a service via the cloud. However, the data has to be trusted to be usable and that is where MDM plays a key role, by bringing data from various sources together in the cloud and ensuring its worthiness for consumption. In that regard, MDM is the lynchpin.”
Shankar continues, “MDM is also critical to the cloud because of the diversity of cloud applications and data that are available. For example, with different applications across different functions, even a simple operation such as order-to-cash – taking the order from the customer, tracking the order, shipping the products and invoicing the customer – spans various different applications. Some of these applications may be cloud-based, while others may be on-premise. Regardless, there is going to be considerable data fragmentation and duplication, such as customer data, making it difficult to get a holistic view. MDM can address this diversity while bridging cloud and on-premise environments.”
photo credit: mnsc
