How data silos are hurting your organization

Data silos are the data storage of a team, a group or a sole department in your organization. This kind of data usually has special features to meet specific requirements of the business units, so it is usually inconsistent with the whole data system. Although data silos serve a purpose, they can be really harmful to your business in many circumstances. We are going to make clear those bad points in this article.

Why Data Silos Worsen Your Business

Uncompleted Data Set

Data silos only allow people who are in charge of selected jobs can access. Therefore, it’s hard for all the employees in your company to utilize the data source, and what they can get is just an incomplete data set. As we know, business runners need to have a data-driven mindset and make wise decisions based on completed data sources. Lack of data can cause misunderstanding during evaluating business performance, wrong decision-making and ineffective business strategies in both the short-term and long-term. 

Misleading Data

As we mentioned, data silos are inaccessible to all individuals outside of the team. Therefore, other departments can not have a chance to double-check the validity, trustworthiness and consistency of the data. For example, the sales department cannot check and update the sale data silos because the marketing department is currently taking control of them. Therefore, the marketing team can not catch the latest trends as well as current customer demands, so they will come up with unsuitable and unrelated approaches due to misleading data.

It is undeniable that businesses need to invest in another data storage for data silos so the costs for IT activities will increase due to the larger number of servers and storage devices. Moreover, you may need to spend a considerable amount of money to deploy and manage those systems. As a result, data silos will unnecessarily increase the management and softwares expenses, which can worsen the business in the long term.

Isolated Users

As data silos will block outsiders, even the employees in the companies, it reduces chances for the staff to collaborate and support each other in hard work. Thus, the process of transporting information may take a long time as different departments need more manual copy and report approaches instead of data sharing. Therefore, the overall productivity and transparency of the businesses can plummet, and negatively affect the revenues and operation.

Lack Of Security

Normally, businesses with data silos take advantage of some popular tools like spreadsheets and Google Drive to store the data. However, those storage is not as secure as other kinds of professional data systems. There are so many arising problems in an insecure system, including data-stolen, lack of privacy, data leakage and so on. As a result, data silos put your valuable information out of the protection laws and put your company at a security risk.

Conclusion

Getting away from data silos is truly essential for your business growth. If you have a large business with different data systems, you can try to contact KinCloud to have effective approaches to integration without building data silos.