Data Deduplication Solutions — How to Reduce Data Redundancy

Data redundancy and messy lists can have a significant impact on your bottom line. But the time needed to clean data and constantly keep lists rich and efficient is often not found. When various teams are adding their twist on notes, contact info, the status of intent, etc., as you probably know, it can get chaotic. One sure fire way to calm the chaos that is data redundancy is through data deduplication.

It's common knowledge that your data is rarely stored in only one place, which often leads to data silos. Data silos are problematic and happen at nearly every business that don't have a central database accessible to all departments. As you try to bridge communication gaps between your team, you'll typically encounter many redundancies and inconsistencies. The skewed and outdated data will lead to less efficient business decisions. Read on as we share more about how to avoid data redundancy in your database with the help of Hybrid Automation to help you make accurate data-driven decisions.

What is data redundancy, and how can the deduplication of data help?

If you don’t know if you have data redundancy, that lack of knowledge might mean your business is at risk. And sometimes, the answer isn’t obvious. You could have the same data in multiple formats or tables. This deduplication of data can make it quite difficult to conduct valuable data analysis, which can deny you a valuable tool to make data-driven decisions.

Large datasets often require a lot of deduplication, which increases the costs of storing the data. What you should be looking out for is where data is being stored, and if it’s being stored in multiple and separate places. If your teams are working individually and keeping individual notes, you can run into redundancies and inconsistencies in delivery and results to your teams and even your customers.

Datasets that have high deduplication could see optimization rates of up to 95%, or a 20x reduction in storage utilization.

What makes manually cleaning data challenging?

Manually cleaning data is a tedious process and is challenging because you must examine large datasets and adjust or fix columns and cells individually. While bar charts and histograms can help, they're more suitable for viewing data from a single column.

When can data automation be applied to your deduplication process?

There are many positive reasons why automating your deduplication of data can help your teams. As previously mentioned, when you have multiple users accessing the same data—or creating copies and making modifications on their own—this leads to duplicate and redundant data. Running a Deduplication Wrkflow, like we have at Wrk, can quickly clean up messy lists and find outdated and repeated data, and put it all in one place.

Having all your data in one place guarantees streamlined communication, efficient outreach from your teams, consistent nurturing to your customers, and removes extra work in your business processes.

Here’s a brief outline of the steps you can take to clear up your lists:

• Deduplicate your contacts in Salesforce. Provide clear and updated contact information for your Sales and Customer Success teams to access from anywhere, at any time.

• Merge multiple lists found in different applications like HubSpot, or personal lists. Easily bring all of your lists, records, and values and house them in the same location without losing anything important.

• Delete any redundancies. Redundant data is messy data. If you can’t find a phone number, or if the job title you have of a lead isn’t the most up-to-date, then you’ll come off as ill-informed and unorganized. While merging your data, you’ll also be able to delete incorrect information so the entire team is up to date.

The benefits of maintaining clean data in your work process

The process requires very little overhead, can run (and clean) independently, can easily crawl through your lists, and integrate with whatever CRMs you may be using from HubSpot to Salesforce. To add onto these benefits, it can also operate during off-peak times. Economically, adding to and cleaning up storage space used by companies (whether in the Cloud or shared CRMs), makes a lot of sense, as you’re likely using up (and paying for) unnecessary space with redundant data.

Data deduplication also benefits regulatory compliance. Keeping customer or employee information up to date is crucial to remaining compliant with regulations.

The benefits are seen in abundance in virtual environments where multiple virtual machines are used for testing and development or application deployments. Another area that has found huge benefits is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), because as expected, the deduplication of data among desktops is very high. Regardless of workload type, deduplication can offer many benefits to various workloads and it is an essential step to make your data restores and backups run much faster, and to guarantee that everyone is working with the richest and best data available.

Read more about how our Deduplication Wrkflows will benefit your unique workloads to help drive data-driven decisions forward. And if you're curious to know what other processes we can automate today, check out our other Wrkflows!