What Is a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) & How to Build One?

Data is often scattered across multiple systems within an organization, creating silos that hinder data-driven decision-making. When the teams operate with inconsistent or incomplete information, it can lead them to misaligned objectives. To overcome these challenges, modern businesses are adopting the Single Source of Truth (SSOT).

This article will help you understand SSOT and how to build it to ensure consistency, improve collaboration, and drive informed business strategies.

What Is a Single Source of Truth (SSoT)?

A Single Source of Truth (SSOT) is the practice of consolidating data from various sources into a centralized repository. Establishing this single referential repository allows all your teams across different locations to rely on a consistent and accurate version of data, improving operational efficiency.

The SSOT is not a strategy, tool, or system but a state where all your organizational data assets are accessible through a single reference point. This ensures control over access and compliance with data governance policies. You can host the SSOT by leveraging a cloud-based data warehouse, data lake solutions, or enterprise data management systems, depending on your organization’s needs.

Why Is SSOT Important in Modern Data Architecture?

Informed decision-making and seamless collaboration across organizations are crucial in modern data systems. To achieve these benefits, SSOT can help you:

Reduce Data Silos

Data silos occur when data is isolated and inaccessible to other parts of organizational teams. Such siloed data leads to fragmented insights and difficult collaboration.

Implementing a SSOT can help you break down these data silos by integrating various systems into a central repository. This enables all your teams to utilize consistent data in real-time.

Minimize Data Duplication

Data duplication can cause inconsistencies, confusion, and errors due to manual entry mistakes or integration challenges. Adopting SSOT will allow you to reduce redundancy by ensuring a single, authoritative version of each dataset. Through data validation rules and de-duplication algorithms, SSOT enables you to maintain data integrity and accuracy.

Enhanced Productivity

With SSOT in place, your teams spend less time searching for data or reconciling discrepancies between systems. They can access the right data quickly and confidently, improving productivity and enabling faster decision-making.

Uncover Relationships and Patterns

When you integrate data into a single reliable source, you can extract hidden relationships and patterns that might go unnoticed. Analyzing comprehensive, accurate data across different departments via SSOT, you can identify opportunities for business growth and develop more effective strategies.

Challenges with Implementing a Single Source of Truth

• Integration Complexity: Connecting data from multiple systems into a unified data hub can involve technical challenges when encountering issues like incompatible formats or data mapping errors. These difficulties can lead to delays, increased costs, and the need for specialized tools or expertise to ensure smooth integration.‍
• High Implementation Costs: Building SSOT may need significant investment in infrastructure, tools, and skilled personnel. For some organizations, allocating necessary resources in the initial setup can be limited due to the high upfront costs.
• ‍Scalability Concerns: If you did not design the SSOT for future growth, it may struggle to manage increasing amounts of data or users as your organization expands.‍
• Handling Resistance to Change: Your employees may resist switching from familiar systems to implementing SSOT. Such a transition involves adopting new tools and processes, which can seem challenging for employees to operate without proper training. This resistance can slow down adoption and impact collaboration.

Architectural Approaches to Obtain a Single Source of Truth

There are numerous methods to achieving SSOT architecture; let’s look at a few of them:

Data Warehousing

Data warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift are often used for SSOT due to their scalability and integration capabilities. To keep the data warehouse updated, you can implement CDC-like approaches, providing near-real-time data.

Data Virtualization

Data virtualization allows you to access data from different data sources without physically moving it. By creating a virtual layer, a data virtualization solution allows you to aggregate data from multiple databases, cloud systems, and applications. As a result, you can maintain a centralized view of the data. This approach provides an SSOT across your organization without the need to duplicate or consolidate data in one physical location.

Master Data Management

Master Data Management (MDM) is a process of managing your organization’s master data, including customer, product, and financial, to provide a single reference point. Besides this, MDM enables you to enforce strong governance policies to ensure that data is properly managed and compliant across your organization.

Enterprise Service Bus

An Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) allows you to receive data updates from multiple systems. With an ESB, source platforms send data to your aggregated data systems regularly. Any changes in those sources, such as new records, updates, or deletions, are published via the ESB. This method keeps your data synchronized and consistently shared across systems, contributing to obtaining SSOT.

How to Build a Single Source of Truth?

Here are the steps to help you successfully build and maintain an SSOT in your organization, which will improve data management.

Step 1: Identify the Data Sources

The first step is identifying which data sources across your organization are essential and should be included in the SSOT. This involves understanding and documenting the various systems, databases, applications, and files containing relevant business information. You must also ensure the accuracy and reliability of the identified data sources.

Step 2: Choose the Right Tool for Data Integration

Once you identify the data sources, you need to select the right tool for managing and integrating them. You can consolidate data from your chosen sources seamlessly by using a no-code data movement platform like Airbyte. It provides 550+ pre-built source and destination connectors to automate your integration tasks.

If you cannot find a connector that meets your needs, you can quickly build one using its no-code Connector Builder. The AI assistant feature in the Connector Builder prefills the necessary configuration fields, reducing the development time.

Step 3: Define a Data Schema for SSOT

A data schema serves as a blueprint that helps you define the structure and relationships of your data within a destination system. After identifying your data sources and selecting the required integration tool, defining a data schema provides an organized approach to managing and accessing data across your organization. Some tips to enhance your data schema’s effectiveness when creating SSOT are:

• Create separate tables for each main entity.
• Use normalization to eliminate data duplication.
• Assign primary keys and establish relationships.
• Use consistent naming conventions.
• Set constraints to maintain data quality and integrity.
• Index frequently used columns for faster queries.
• Regularly review and update the schema.

Step 4: Design the Integration Workflow

Once your data schema is ready, the next step is to design a clear workflow to create a unified view of entities from your source. If you're leveraging Airbyte, you can easily perform this using the simple steps as follows:

1. Select the sources from the Airbyte UI and start configuring the connectors by filling in the mandatory fields.
2. Set up the destination you choose as your SSOT.
3. Once both configurations are complete, you can configure the connection between the source and destination platforms.
4. In the connection settings, select the required streams of data to be replicated in the SSOT, choose the sync mode, and specify the replication frequency.

This completes the integration workflow. When you finish the initial sync, you can create and apply custom transformation on the selected data with the support of dbt Cloud integration.

Step 5: Implement Access Control and Security

To safeguard your SSOT, you must implement robust access control and security measures. You can start by defining user roles and permissions, followed by setting up authentication protocols. For more security, you can employ encryption techniques to help you protect data and configure firewalls or intrusion detection systems to defend against potential threats.

To facilitate safe data movement, Airbyte provides various security options. This includes OAuth 2.0, API key authentication, role-based access control, data encryption with SSL/TLS protocols, and SSH tunneling.

Airbyte also complies with regulatory standards such as GDPR, SOC 2 Type II assessment, ISO270001, and HIPAA. This compliance regulation ensures that data processing and storage practices meet industry standards for data protection.

Step 6: Keep the Data Updated

Maintaining an up-to-date SSOT is critical for ensuring that your organization operates with the most relevant data. You must implement checks to identify source updates and establish methods for consistent data synchronization across systems.

Leveraging Airbyte can help you keep your data updated within your SSOT. Its native connectors, including Postgres, MongoDB, MySQL, and MS SQL Server, support a change data capture approach. The CDC enables you to track changes in the source system and replicate them in your chosen destination.

In addition, Airbyte provides multiple sync modes—Incremental | Append, Incremental | Append + Deduped, Full Refresh | Append, Full Refresh | Overwrite, and Full Refresh | Overwrite + Deuped.

Step 7: Provide Training for New Users

When your SSOT is built and operational, it is crucial to train your employees on how to use it effectively. Develop tailored training programs for different user roles within your organization. Ensure that your team members understand the processes for accessing and interpreting the data in the SSOT.

How to Maintain Data Integrity & Governance While Creating SSoT?

Maintaining data integrity and governance while creating SSOT involves implementing strong validation, auditing, and compliance mechanisms throughout the data lifecycle. Here are a few practices to promote data integrity and governance:

• Verify the data is reliable by applying appropriate quality rules and automated validation checks during the integration process.
• Use data governance practices, such as role-based access control (RBAC) and clear data ownership definitions, to maintain accountability.
• Regular audit data for compliance with relevant regulations like GDPR or HIPAA.
• Ensure data lineage is tracked to understand its origin and transformation.

Use Case Examples For Single Source of Truth

Here are a few companies that use SSOT solutions for better performance:

Goodgame Studios

Goodgame Studios is known for its popular free-to-play mobile and browser games like Big Farm Mobile Harvest and Empire: Four Kingdoms. It has faced challenges due to iOS 14’s new reporting system. The team struggled with double-counting installs between their internal Marketing Campaign Optimization dashboard and the SKAN dashboard, as SKAN lacked device-specific data.

To solve the SKAN reporting issue, Goodgame Studios implemented SSOT by flagging and deduplicating non-organic installs that have already been attributed via SKAN.

Liberty Mutual

Liberty Mutual is the sixth largest U.S. insurance company, providing various insurance products and services. They use an integrated, single source of truth data platform called Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB). This platform builds trust through the cryptographically verifiable sequencing of events that support the audit, balance, and control of data integration.

Conclusion

In any organization, dispersed data across multiple systems may create inefficiencies and poor decision-making. Having a single source of truth can help ensure all stakeholders are aligned and operations run smoothly.

Airbyte is a prominent data integration tool that allows you to ease the task of centralizing data into a platform, serving as your SSOT. To leverage Airbyte for your organizational needs, you can connect with experts.