Data discovery might sound like one of those obscure, IT-centric terms that you don’t need to know about, but when you become aware of how much it can help your business it will be something you want to know about.

Data discovery is an element of data management, the process of collecting and analysing data from different sources to help define patterns and trends in data. Data discovery typically works in conjunction with business intelligence (BI), and amalgamates specific data sources for the business to produce a trajectory based on such insights.

Data discovery includes aspects like cleaning and preparing data, combining multiple data sources, performing analytics to define business insights and sharing data to necessary colleagues.

Data discovery solutions are a partner process of data classification, where data is classified according to its value, security or sensitivity.

So, now that we’ve had a look at what, exactly, data solution is, let’s take a look at how it can help your business thrive in the digital, data-focused era…

The awesome benefits of data detection

An organisation’s data is stored on a range of storage devices via multiple data sources, and can be accessed by staff, stakeholders, partners and customers. There are any advantages to data identification and classification, including:

  • Knowing exactly where your organisation’s data is located and who can access it.
  • Visualise data sets & their multiple uses across the organisation.
  • Define policies to protect & control data using content-specific factors.
  • Reduce the risk that comes with data migrations.
  • Know which data is sent, how it is sent & via which channels it is sent.
  • Perform automated & manual data classification.
  • Identify, classify, store & track highly sensitive data.
  • Perform compliance assessment & risk management.

Finally, data discovery helps an organisation reduce the risk of loss or exposure of sensitive data, as well as helping the organisation produce important security measures for such data protection. But not only this, data discovery helps an organisation understand their data that can help them use it to their advantage in the future.

What do data discovery platforms do?

Data discovery platforms are a comprehensive suite of tools that help organisations detect patterns in their data, derive business insights and identify outliers around any determined patterns.

Data discovery platforms come with many advantages, including:

  • Enable visualisation, migration & integration of multiple data sources.
  • Help an organisation analyse data at any specific moment, helping them make business decisions in real-time.
  • Automatically classify large amounts of sensitive unstructured & structured data.
  • Opens up more data for analysis, creating more variables for data models.

The amazing features of data discovery

Data discovery comes with a host of amazing features that make it valuable for any organisation, including:

  • Data visualisations & analysis (maps, tables, charts & other representations).
  • Data preparation & tools to improve the quality of an organisation’s data.
  • Metadata management, which is often an important part of compliance.
  • Data classification, identification, tracking & monitoring.
  • Advanced machine learning capabilities such as predictive analysis.
  • Evaluation of data properties & quality at the team, user & application level.
  • Faster query response times through in-memory analytics.

[Data discovery] is easily one of the most valuable methods for an organisation to understand its data and put it to the best use. You can gain valuable insights into previously stored data to know how to apply it with best tech practise, thus having the added benefit of making important moves in real time.