Data Sharing Essentials – Approaches, Benefits, and Solutions
Data sharing makes a single copy of data available to multiple applications, users, and external business partners.
Why is Data Sharing Important?
Data sharing is important because it provides controlled, trusted, and maintained copies of high-quality data to subscribers. Data sharing is more efficient and effective than having multiple uncontrolled copies of a data set being used by internal and external organizations.
Data Sharing Approaches
There are many ways to share data. Below are some common examples:
- File Transfer Protocol (FTP): Operating system folders containing data files can be shared with external and internal users using mechanisms such as FTP and SFTP. Security is provided using passwords. This is great for sharing software patches or files with customers.
- Cloud Files: Google, Amazon and Microsoft offer scalable file stores not constrained by physical volume sizes, making them ideal for file sharing. The consumer of these files just needs login credentials and the URL of the file or folder.
- Web API: Apache Kafka shares data streams using a publish and subscribe scheme. An application programming interface (API) is provided to consuming applications that receive near real-time records.
- Event-Based Services: Event management systems provide immediate access to data demanded by applications such as gaming, stock trading, navigation systems, and emergency alerting systems. In these cases, changes are pushed to the client systems through APIs such as SMS and MQTT.
- Download: Many data publishers, such as the US government, like to share data using simple web downloads. These can be hyperlinked within page text or shared as URLs in emails.
- Database: Data sharing can be done using a higher-level API like SQL access. This saves subscribers the trouble of extracting and loading the data in their own data warehouse. Having SQL access allows users to point their BI dashboards to the shared data warehouse to analyze and visualize data.
Benefits of Data Sharing
Below are some of the many benefits of data sharing:
- Improves data governance by promoting the use of best-in-class data.
- Lowers data management costs by limiting the number of copies of data in circulation.
- Discourages siloed use of data by creating natural data bridges across lines of business or departments. Customer data, for example, should be in a single repository so all departments know how long they have been loyal and whether they have a problem impacting billing.
- Publishers of shared data retain sole write access to update and correct data as needed. This way, subscribers always have access to current, high-quality data.
- Data sharing is a form of democratizing data analysis by providing clean, high-quality data to citizen data analysts and data professionals.
Data Sharing With Actian
Actian Data Intelligence Platform is purpose-built to help organizations unify, manage, and understand their data across hybrid environments. It brings together metadata management, governance, lineage, quality monitoring, and automation in a single platform. This enables teams to see where data comes from, how it’s used, and whether it meets internal and external requirements.
Through its centralized interface, Actian supports real-time insight into data structures and flows, making it easier to apply policies, resolve issues, and collaborate across departments. The platform also helps connect data to business context, enabling teams to use data more effectively and responsibly. Actian’s platform is designed to scale with evolving data ecosystems, supporting consistent, intelligent, and secure data use across the enterprise. Request your personalized demo.
FAQs
Data sharing is the process of making data available to other individuals, organizations, or systems for analysis, collaboration, or decision-making. It enables transparency, improves efficiency, and fosters innovation across industries by allowing access to valuable information in a secure and ethical way.
Data sharing helps businesses and researchers make better decisions through collaboration and access to diverse datasets. It enhances productivity, reduces duplication of efforts, and promotes innovation—especially in fields like healthcare, education, and technology.
Organizations can ensure secure data sharing by implementing encryption, access controls, anonymization techniques, and compliance with data privacy regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA. Using secure platforms and consent-based sharing also helps maintain trust and data integrity.
For businesses, data sharing leads to improved analytics, stronger partnerships, better customer insights, and more efficient operations. It also enables predictive modeling and innovation by combining internal and external data sources.
Common challenges include data privacy concerns, lack of standardized formats, security risks, and compliance with data protection laws. Overcoming these challenges requires strong governance policies, clear data ownership rules, and secure sharing frameworks.
Best practices include obtaining consent before sharing data, anonymizing sensitive information, using secure transfer protocols, and ensuring transparency about how data will be used. Organizations should also establish clear data-sharing agreements to protect all parties involved.
