Definition
Data onboarding is the process of bringing new data into an organization's systems and making it ready for use. It involves ingesting, validating, transforming, and integrating data from various sources into a central repository or data platform. This ensures data is accurate, consistent, and accessible for analysis, reporting, and operational needs. In practice, it often involves automated pipelines that extract data from applications, clean it, and load it into a data warehouse or data lake. Effective data onboarding is crucial for reliable business intelligence, informed decision making, and maintaining data governance. For example, a retail company onboarding customer purchase data from its e-commerce site to its analytics platform. This differs from data migration, which typically involves moving existing data from one system to another, rather than introducing new data streams. Concepts related to data onboarding appear in domains like data management and cloud data services on certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate.