A Primer to the World of Data

Data becomes useful knowledge and products through several stages, including data gathering, extraction, processing, and use for business intelligence or powering products. The cloud plays a significant role in this process by offering accessible, cheap, performant, and scalable off-the-shelf solutions to IT infrastructure needs. Modern data stacks are hosted in the cloud, with many products and services being "cloud-native." Data sources can originate from various places such as sensor inputs, manual data entry, digital documents, or software triggers. Centralizing data is crucial for gaining a comprehensive view of an organization's operations and tracking individual entities across multiple applications. Processing the data involves transformations like data cleaning, summarizing, pivoting tables, and joining records from multiple sources together. Ultimately, the data is used to guide decisions at every level of an organization and power artificially intelligent products through analytics or business intelligence platforms.