Survivability in the digital era means organizations—especially those geographically dispersed around the country or the world—must constantly rely on the ability to access and use data from multiple sites and storage sources. Managing this process, however, can be a near-impossible challenge with perpetual frustrations.

The efficiency of business operations depends on the accessibility of data—but time is constantly wasted waiting for data to be transferred or copied from multiple sources. Moreover, as datasets grow larger, the network speeds, size, and complexity associated with moving that data reduce business agility, impede productivity–and reintroduce cost, risks, and time delays each time data is moved, assuming it can be moved at all. At the very least, this is a tedious experience—and an inconvenience. But the impacts of slow access to distributed data can be far more significant for organizations.

With data stored in multiple silos, it can become very difficult to get an up-to-date view of the company’s overall performance or real-time insights, making it harder to make decisions with accurate information. Unfortunately, this is a common scenario, as modern organizations’ tech stacks span across multiple platforms, clouds, databases, and more – situated across the globe from edge to core to cloud. The breadth of infrastructure and physical distance creates integration and data management complexity and drives a need for more transparency.  This, in turn, puts an organization’s decision-making process at risk and negatively affects workflow efficiency.

Another challenge associated with distributed data access is the security risks related to valuable IPs. While monitoring and complying with security protocols across multiple platforms is often costly and time-consuming, it is a critical task as data must be protected from vulnerabilities as it is used, stored, and accessed across the business environment. Moreover, not only do multiple sources (or copies) of data make managing data lineage (and using the latest and most relevant data) more complex, but it also increases the likelihood that malicious actors could gain access to confidential company information stored across various platforms.

Meanwhile, the costs associated with distributed data access can also be frustrating for business owners and IT professionals. In many cases, organizations must pay each provider within your infrastructure stack separately, which can all add up quickly.

Put simply, the way many organizations continue to access their distributed data is bad for business. The good news is that organizations don’t have to keep suffering.

Ultimately, the frustrations listed above are all related to outdated data access technologies impeding timely access to data. Unfortunately, many businesses still rely on legacy systems that may not be able to handle today’s modern workloads or keep up with changing customer demands. As such, this leads to slower response times and poorer performance—causing frequent headaches for employers, employees, and even customers.

Fortunately, modern data access technology is accelerating and improving accuracy when it comes to distributed data management. In fact, today’s solutions no longer require you to keep moving your data around the world to make it available. Instead, organizations can remotely access all their key data in real time by converting their unstructured data into a single, globally accessible dataset. As a result, less movement equals less security risk, not to mention lower associated costs.

As they say, time is money—and traditional data movement can be a considerable waste of time and money. Thankfully, modern data access solutions effectively eliminate time otherwise spent waiting on data transfers or the synchronization of file systems. Moreover, with access to a single data set that provides local-like performance regardless of location, decision-makers now have faster time-to-insight for collaboration—enabling them to be increasingly productive and take more meaningful action on critical business issues.