What are two difficulties involved in managing data?

What are two difficulties involved in managing data? what are two solutions to these problems? use spa formating and 2 outside references. The Difficulties of Managing Data Because data are processed in several stages and often in multiple locations, they are frequently subject to problems and difficulties. Managing data in organizations is difficult for many reasons. First, the amount of data increases exponentially with time. Much historical data must be kept for a long time, and new data are added rapidly. For example, to support millions of customers, large retailers such as Walmart have to manage many petabytes of data. (A petabyte is approximately 1,000 terabytes, or trillions of bytes; see Technology Guide 1.) Data are also scattered throughout organizations, and they are collected by many individuals using various methods and devices. These data are frequently stored in numerous servers and locations and in different computing systems, databases, formats, and human and computer languages. Another problem is that data are generated from multiple sources: internal sources (for example, corporate databases and company documents); personal sources (for example, personal thoughts, opinions, and experiences); and external sources (for example, commercial databases, government reports, and corporate websites). Data also come from the Web in the form of clickstream data. Clickstream data is data that visitors and customers produce when they visit a website and click on hyperlinks (described in Chapter 6). Clickstream data provides a trail of the users’ activities in the website, including user behavior and browsing patterns. Adding to these problems is the fact that new sources of data such as blogs, podcasts, tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, texts, and RFID tags and other wireless sensors are constantly being developed, and the data these technologies generate must be managed. Also, the data becomes less current over time. For example, customers move to new addresses or they change their names; companies go out of business or are bought; new products are developed; employees are hired or fired; and companies expand into new countries. Data are also subject to data rot. Data rot refers primarily to problems with the media on which the data are stored. Over time, temperature, humidity, and exposure to light can cause physical problems with storage media and thus make it difficult to access the data. The second aspect of data rot is that finding the machines needed to access the data can be difficult. For example, it is almost impossible today to find 8-track players for playing and listening to music. Consequently, a library of 8-track tapes has become relatively worthless, unless you have a functioning 8-track player or you convert the tapes to a more modern medium such as CDs and DVDs. Data security, quality, and integrity are critical, yet they are easily jeopardized. Legal requirements relating to data also differ among countries as well as among industries, and they change frequently. Another problem arises from the fact that, over time, organizations have developed information systems for specific business processes, such as transaction processing, supply chain management, and customer relationship management. Information systems that specifically support these processes impose unique requirements on data; such requirements result in repetition and conflicts across the organization. For example, the marketing function might maintain information on customers, sales territories, and markets. These data might be duplicated within the billing or customer service functions. This arrangement can produce inconsistent data within the enterprise. Inconsistent data prevent a company from developing a unified view of core business information—data concerning customers, products, finances, and so on—across the organization and its information systems. Two other factors complicate data management. First, federal regulations—for example, the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002—have made it a top priority for companies to better account for how they manage information. Sarbanes–Oxley requires that (1) public companies evaluate and disclose the effectiveness of their internal financial controls and (2) independent auditors for these companies agree to this disclosure. The law also holds CEOs and CFOs personally responsible for such disclosures. If their companies lack satisfactory data management policies and fraud or a security breach occurs, then the company officers could be held liable and face prosecution. Second, companies are drowning in data, much of which are unstructured. As you have seen, the amount of data is increasing exponentially. To be profitable, companies must develop a strategy for managing these data effectively. An additional problem with data management is Big Data.