Enterprises are seeking ways to improve their overall profitability, cut costs, reduce risk and more through better leverage of their data assets.

Significant volumes of complex, diverse data spread across various technology and application silos make it difficult for organizations to achieve these business outcomes. To further complicate matters, there is a range of problems such as

• Separate access mechanisms, syntax, and security for each source
• Lack of proper structure for business user or application consumption and reuse
• Incomplete or duplicate data
• And a mixture of latency issues

Data abstraction overcomes these challenges by transforming data from its native structure and syntax into views and data services that are much easier for business intelligence and analytics developers to use when creating new decision-making applications.

Enterprises can approach data abstraction three ways:

• Manual data abstraction
• Data warehouse schemas
• Data virtualization

Of the three approaches, data virtualization is the superior solution for data abstraction because it enables the most flexibility and agility when you need to provide simple, consistent, business-formatted data from different data locations and sources.

As a complement to Cisco's Data Virtualization software and services, Cisco also provides data abstraction best practices that help you accelerate your data abstraction activities. Composed of three distinct layers (application layer, business layer and physical layer), these best practices support a data reference architecture that rationalizes multiple, diverse data silos for a range of BI and analytic applications. The architecture aligns closely with analyst best practices mapped out by both Forrester and Gartner on the topic of data virtualization. Using these best practices will enable your company to access the right data for the business, gain agility and efficiency, maintain end-to-end control, and increase security of your data across all your data silos.

To learn more about data abstraction best practices using Cisco Data Virtualization, check out our white paper.