Cloud ETL Use Cases:
ETL for Modern Business

Cloud ETL is the modern way to wrangle data. Combining your business’s data from all the multiple sources, whether that be SMS messages from customers, click-throughs on websites, or existing databases, and bringing it together in one data warehouse is the goal of ETL. As a business, what does this mean for you, and when might a high-end ETL tool be of benefit to you in the fast-paced world of big data?

Cloud ETL Basics

ETL stands for Extract, Transform, and Load. It’s the process of taking data from a variety of sources, cleaning it, and transforming it before loading it into a central database, known as a data warehouse.

Related Reading: What is a Data Warehouse?

Cloud ETL means that this process occurs online, without having to rely on physical storage or endless manual intervention. By 2022, 90% of business analysis could be performed via Cloud services. Getting to grips with Cloud ETL now is an ideal way to future-proof any business venture.

Cloud ETL Use Cases

ETL makes the process of data wrangling a lot slicker than traditional methods which may have involved manually coding instructions for every required data pipeline. But beyond that, in what instances can Cloud ETL actually be a boon to your business? Here are just a few Cloud ETL use cases to give you an idea of the benefits of a Cloud-based ETL tool.

Manage Multiple Sources with Ease

For any modern business, data is streaming in from multiple sources. Forget about data warehousing just being the place where customer details pile up. Think about your social media channels, your emails, your SMS messages from clients or customers. Think about your latest blog and how many views it got, and how many of those went on to purchase your product or service. Think about a promotion on your website that wasn’t performing adequately.

Now, imagine data pipelines that manage all that, sending it to one central system where business intelligence tools can pull out the relevant information for critical reports and enterprise management. Content creators can duplicate successful blog styles. Marketers can switch promotions out. Valuable customer comments get logged and responded to, or used to drive improvements.

According to IBM, a successful data warehouse is “…a decision support system (DSS) environment in which you can evaluate the performance of an entire enterprise over time.” It only gets this way by channeling as much available data as possible from all relevant sources. This gives you the absolute best picture of what’s happening in your business over any period of time.

Reduce Costs and Save Space

Moving any task to the Cloud means it no longer needs physical server space. Prior to the advent of Cloud ETL tools and Cloud-based data warehousing, data storage occurred in-house. This meant rooms dedicated to servers or storage space simply for keeping track of the business data. This also meant hiring individuals or teams (depending on the size of the business and the volume of data concerned) to manage this storage and deal with any maintenance or technical issues. Cloud-based ETL has removed the need for both these aspects of traditional data management when combined with a cloud-based data warehousing solution.

Work with Other Cloud-Based Services

On that note, with manual data management, it would have been challenging to set up multiple data pipelines to an online data warehouse such as Amazon Redshift. A fully Cloud-based ETL tool is designed with online services in mind, so there are no concerns about a lack of compatibility. Cloud ETL will normally manage multiple data inputs from all over the Cloud as well as physical and other sources, plus will output to a range of Cloud-based destinations, allowing businesses to keep their data administration safe, secure, and future proof.

Automation

This is possibly one of the most powerful Cloud ETL use cases there is. In the past, data management was a manual affair. Hand-coded data pipelines had to be manually run and, even then, many amendments or conflicts had to be dealt with one agonizing line of code at a time. Using a dedicated ETL tool takes away the need to have someone constantly monitoring the data flow. Fully automated data pipelines free up personnel who can feed their passions back into your business, plus the data gets where it needs to be faster. This allows for faster analysis, quicker insights, and the chance to get one step ahead of the competition. Imagine taking all your business data and pumping it straight into salesforce without any intervention from yourself, other than setting up the initial data pipelines. Instead of reams of dark data (data which gets collected but never utilized), you suddenly have opportunities for insights that simply weren’t possible with traditional data wrangling methods.

Integrate.io and Cloud ETL

Integrate.io is an ETL and ELT tool designed for the modern cloud. Integrate.io can link data from an incredibly diverse range of sources, including but not limited to MongoDB, Amazon Redshift, Salesforce, QuickBooks, and many more. A user-friendly drag and drop system to create data pipelines is intuitive to get to grips with and accessible to those who aren’t savvy in high-level coding.

Schedule a conversation with Integrate.io and find out more about how Cloud ETL can help your business take the next step in data management.