Like the best relationships, data interactions are built on trust and truth. Over the past few decades, the number of applications and data has rapidly increased, causing many organizations to seek a “single source of truth”(SSOT). At first, the goal of copying and moving data into a single system of truth seemed attainable. However, today nearly 100% of organizations that sought a SSOT have had minimal success, or given up altogether.

SSOT Challenges

SSOT are passive systems where data needs to be validated at a point in time and most often moved to a secondary repository. Hybrid environments and multi-cloud strategies make it nearly impossible to move together all pertinent data into one system.. Some organizations have tried to store SSOT data into an analytical ready repository, such as a data warehouse or data lake. Alternatively, they may look to their master data management solution for the SSOT.

Data lakes usually do not have all of the metadata stored with them and master data management is too rigid. This then requires marketing or sales teams to develop their own more nimble Customer Data Platforms (CDP) systems to get the data more quickly.. SSOT is only some of the corporate data and is usually static. This doesn’t always meet the needs of modern organizations because static data doesn’t include much cloud, fringe, or streaming data.

Organizations need dynamic data, they need it now, and they need it to be flexible. When it comes to making key corporate decisions, this is where trusting the data is more holistic.. Analytical use cases are looking for both accuracy and relevance. You can’t meet these requirements through a SSOT, instead you need to lean into the concept of data trust.

Bridging the Gap in Single Source of Truth

BigID’s Data Intelligence Platform feeds this highly dynamic, trustworthy model by providing real-time curated access to all your key data sources whether structured, semi-structured, unstructured or streaming data. Our data catalog contains continually updated views of the data and the metadata from these sources. In addition, the data has been subject to over 500 ML–augmented classifiers that label the data for appropriate use cases across data governance, data security and privacy. These labels are dynamic and can be updated as the source data is updated, providing that level of trust in the data. In this case, the data doesn’t have to be ported to a static location. Data gravity prevents too much of the data to move easily as it is highly integrated with certain applications and data stores.

BigID also provides applications that sit on top of our Data Intelligence Platform for data quality, data stewardship, privacy management, data security and much more. These tools assist in curating and cleaning up the data while also protecting the privacy associated with it. BigID helps you make better key decisions by leveraging a combination of confidence and risk scores for data quality and security.

While trying to create SSOT is an alluring task, it’s far more beneficial to focus on how you can trust your data enough to make decisions. BigID helps surface your key corporate data from all your data sources and prepares it for use. This way, you can confidently make decisions today and everyday after. Find out how to create an SSOT with BigID in a 1:1 session with our data experts, or check out this on demand session on how to Optimize Data Trust for Digital Transformation.