Everyone knows the importance of real-time access to real-time information. Organizations that are integrating data from disparate sources and distributing it in real time have found that they can cut costs, reduce risk and improve business insight at the same time.

With more organizations operating around the clock in multiple locations and time zones, the need for real-time information is imperative. Data must be continuously available for transactional processing by mission-critical systems and to support business intelligence activities. It must also be accessible across the enterprise, anywhere in the world.

As most business activities today are transaction-based—whether making purchases, paying bills, updating account information or managing patient records within hospital networks—end users are demanding the right to access, analyze, act on, integrate, store, and verify transactional data, often in real time and without system interruption or downtime.

The number one challenge facing organizations that want to provide real-time access to real-time data is integrating an ever growing amount of information from heterogeneous enterprise IT environments. This must be done while ensuring no service interruptions or performance degradation to critical business applications. Data integrity must also be assured as information is moved between systems.

High performance data integration
Many organizations are wary of data integration projects, believing they involve data migrations that are complicated, expensive, and likely to impact day-to-day operations. However, data integration and replication solutions exist that facilitate the capture, routing, transformation, and delivery of transactional data between heterogeneous databases in real time with minimal overhead. Best of all, the benefits of data integration can be felt almost immediately.