Your retail business opportunities have shifted dramatically with the introduction of big data, and so has its challenges. There is so much information to be taken advantage of, from price and inventory data to customer credit card numbers, employee records, and competitive analysis. All of this data needs to be readily available, managed, protected, and kept up to date.
The sheer volume of information retailers have to deal with on a daily basis is overwhelming in and of itself, and there are also remarkable cost considerations. Retail data volumes can easily drain both financial and system resources, impacting the productivity of your operations. By using data compression, however, you can lower these retail data volumes and costs.
Why Compress Retail Data?
Compressing retail data not only improves system performance and optimizes data backup times but also significantly reduces data storage and management costs. Increasing data storage efficiency reduces your overall disk consumption for both structured and unstructured data, resulting in a significant impact on your systems’ performance and on actual costs.
Your retail organization’s data storage and accompanying costs will thus diminish although data access actually improves. Even as your databases continue to grow, this ongoing compression of your data significantly reduces the amount of time that operational tasks like backups take, freeing up your resources to run business applications and analytics faster and more efficiently.
What is Data Compression, Anyway?
Data compression is a reduction of data volumes as a way to maximize resources and reduce costs. It is essential in the face of the rapid growth in retail data volumes. An effective database management system de-duplicates and compresses unstructured data, reducing your overall storage footprint while freeing up up time and resources being spent on backups. It essentially improves your network’s bandwidth and memory, providing even greater performance.
Both your day-to-day decision-making processes and long-term planning seek to help your retail organization maximize profits, which relies on your ability to access rapidly-changing information quickly and operate efficiently. Prices of retail products are constantly shifting in response to competition as well as web traffic and other variable market forces, and as a result, your database includes years’ worth of internal and external data, as well as historical transaction data.
Your ability to quickly access and analyze this data in a meaningful way comes from having the right data management and storage tools in place. An effective compression strategy that lowers data volumes on top of these tools will save your organization time and money in any number of ways. It eliminates the complexities of extracting, transforming and loading the information that you need, reduces data latency, and allows for faster data utilization by eliminating multiple copies of the same data – all while reducing the costs.
Key Takeaway
The higher your retail data volumes are, the less productive your systems will be. This means that the data you are extracting and trying to interpret will be less current, and therefore less meaningful. Compression cuts processing times dramatically while reducing storage consumption. It simplifies day-to-day operations, reduces workloads, and saves enormous capital expenditures.
It’s time to leverage your information with state-of-the-art data management tools that will unlock the true value of your data while saving you money. Contact us today to learn how.
