A Centralized Data Warehouse is a data warehousing implementation wherein a single data warehouse serves the needs of several separate business unites simultaneously using a single data model that spans the needs of multiple business divisions.

Today, having information means having power. In any a lot of aspects of daily living, having relevant information can give us more ease in daily activities. This is made manifest by the use of the internet. Because of the information that can be obtained everyday, internet users are growing by the day and the time people spend on the internet is getting longer as web services are getting more and more sophisticated with applications that can gather and aggregate billions of disparate data into useful information.

Businesses are the biggest user of data whether on the internet or within the corporate IT infrastructure. Many companies implement a business data repository which is called data warehouse.

A data warehouse, often also called an operational data store, is a database of information stored according to a defined corporate data model. Data architects and data modelers typically work together to come up with an efficient data warehouse.

In a typical business setting wanting to have a data warehouse, data architects try to define real world business activities in terms of information technology jargon. Real business activities, persons, transactions and events are defined in terms of entities of data representation in a database system. As soon as the entities are all defined, IT professionals then develop programmatic algorithms to represent business rules, policies, best practices and other undertakings within the company.

These data and algorithms are then synthesized in one system in the data warehouse so the whole system can simulate real world activities with a lot faster speed, better efficiency and less prone to errors.

It is not uncommon these days to have a company that has a presence in different geographic locations. Having this set up is like taking advantage of the advancement in information technology which has broken boundaries. Communication can be very easy and fast.

Companies can have the option to have several data warehouses in different locations. These data warehouses communication with each other and send, extracts, transforms and loads data for statistical analysis. Each warehouse typically has a database administrator to manage the data and overcome compatibility problems

Data security is a critical issue in data warehouses from several locations trying to send and receive data and constantly make contact with each other. Communication lines can be open to sniffers and malicious hackers and crackers may be able to steal important information and breach privacy. Securing a network is an expensive activity so companies will have to spend more on buying appropriate technology measures.

Having a centralized data warehouse has its own advantages. The company will have to invest only a central IT team. The central team will be responsible for defining and publishing corporate dimensions. This is can especially true if the company has multiple lines of business to be combined in one robust framework. The team is also responsible for providing cross divisional applications. The need to purchase to software and database tools will only be for the central data warehouse and it can be fairly easy to implement cross divisional applications.

The main disadvantage though with centralized data warehouse is that if the warehouse breaks, it may temporarily mean stoppage for the operations. But of course this can be easily overcome by investing on many computers and other hardware for backing up. These computers must have to be very powerful because they will be dealing with billions of complicated process in the central location of the organization.