Learn How Data Quality Increases Business Success
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain why data quality matters in cloud projects.
- Identify the business impacts of poor data quality.
Meet Jamal Booker, a data analyst at Main Stage Analytics. His job? Turn data into decisions. He helps executives understand customer trends, measure campaign performance, and allocate resources efficiently. But lately, the data just isn’t adding up.
A marketing report has 10,000 active customers. A sales report has 8,500. And finance has 11,200. Three teams, three numbers, zero agreement. Jamal’s manager wants answers. The board wants a report. And Jamal has no idea which number to trust.
He’s not alone. Across industries, poor data quality costs organizations time, money, and credibility—and the problem grows as more data moves to the cloud.
Why Data Quality Matters
Organizations are moving on-premise workloads to the cloud at an increasing rate. You get more scalability, better performance, and faster access to resources. But there’s a catch.
Data degrades as it moves across systems and environments. Values go missing. Formats become inconsistent. Duplicate records accumulate. When your data quality suffers, your organization can’t make intelligent decisions, reduce costs, and grow.
For example, consider how poor data impacts organizations in real, measurable ways.
Business Impact |
Root Cause |
|---|---|
Executives make decisions based on incorrect numbers |
Inconsistent data across systems |
Marketing emails bounce or reach the wrong people |
Duplicate or inaccurate contact records |
Packages are returned or undeliverable |
Missing or malformed address data |
Customer counts are inflated |
Duplicate records not identified |
Legal and regulatory exposure |
Incomplete or inaccurate compliance data |
For Jamal, the impact is immediate. If he can’t trust his data, he can’t do his job—and neither can the organization that depends on his reports.
Meet Informatica Cloud Data Quality
Informatica Cloud Data Quality (CDQ) is a service within the Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform. It gives you the tools to take control of data quality at scale, in the cloud, and without deep technical expertise.
CDQ lets you build reusable rules that cleanse, standardize, deduplicate, and transform data as part of migration, integration, and replication processes. The result? Data your teams can trust.
When you trust your data, you can make decisions faster and with greater confidence. Jamal’s ready to stop guessing and start knowing. Cloud Data Quality is where that journey begins.

Now that you understand how poor data quality impacts business success and frustrates users like Jamal, it’s time to learn how to fix it. In the next unit, you explore the Data Quality Management Process to learn how you can continuously monitor and improve your organization’s data.