It all depends on the size of organization, number of servers, type of servers, datacenter setup architecture, BI tools, data mining is there or not?, DBAs in place, responsibilities and roles, backup tools, backup offline or online, mirroring, RAID etc.…
I would prefer a full time person dedicated for this in a multiple servers/databases/applications scenario who sets up an architecture where masters data is replicated to a dedicated server in real time as and when it is updated in different servers/databases/applications.
<b>How it can be done is a long discussion and will depend on the real scenario, which is going to vary from case to case. One solution may not fit in all cases/scenarios.
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