IBM® Information Server provides industry-leading federation in its WebSphere® Federation Server suite component to enable enterprises to access and integrate diverse data and content, structured and unstructured, mainframe and distributed, public and private, as if it were a single resource.
Because of mergers and acquisitions, hardware and software improvements, and architectural changes, organizations often must integrate diverse data sources into a unified view of the data and ensure that information is always available, when and where it is needed, by people, processes, and applications.
Data federation aims to efficiently join data from multiple heterogeneous sources, leaving the data in place and avoiding data redundancy. The source data remains under the control of the source systems and is pulled on demand for federated access.
A federated system has several important advantages: