With Cloud Data Marketplace, Informatica, a provider of enterprise cloud data management software, presents a hub for company-internal data. This combines a data catalog with data governance and is intended to guarantee users secure access to reliable data and analyses.
Informatica has migrated all of its functional modules to a cloud platform, allowing customers to perform all data management tasks in the cloud. The new “cloud data management” hub is intended to simplify the legally compliant sharing of confidential company data. In turn, this should increase productivity and help make more informed decisions.
Cloud Data Management
The challenge in cloud data management is by no means trivial because larger companies work with numerous applications, each of which brings its data silos. A 2021 IDC study commissioned by Informatica among Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) worldwide found that “79 percent of companies use more than 100 and 30 percent use more than 1,000 data sources” and that these board members average “35 percent of their time managing data on a day-to-day basis, rather than using data to drive strategy and innovation.”
According to IDC, the widespread hybrid and multi-cloud strategy pursued by 92 percent of large companies have improved the situation. “By 2020, most organizations have expanded cloud-hosted data management capabilities by 10-20 percent, yet three-quarters of the organizations surveyed do not yet have a complete architecture for managing a range of end-to-end data activities, including integration, access control, governance, and protection.”
The most important characteristics of those driving data-driven transformations while delivering business value are solving fragmentation and complexity problems across data, technology, and people, instead of those who are still struggling to make sense of all their data.”
Therefore, leading companies are defining a data strategy alongside their general IT strategy, investing in CDOs and their teams, and implementing a data platform with business processes to meet the needs of data producers and consumers.
They provide governed self-access to data across the organization, leverage AI, migrate data to the cloud, and run a robust data and analytics training program to ensure a strong data culture.
For data scientists and users in the specialist departments to find relevant data and analyzes AI models in the shortest possible time, they need to know where this information is available in the company. The cloud data marketplace must collect and tap into all necessary data sources in a federated manner.
The Cloud Data Marketplace
“The data remains at the place of origin,” “but the metadata that describes it is created and enriched in the marketplace. The Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog provides corresponding functions to enrich and improve data quality. The AI Engine CLAIRE automatically classifies, validates, and labels the metadata.” After this pass, the semantics of the business processes are uniform throughout the company. “This context also makes data discovery easier and more productive.”
A data governance function controls role-based access to only authorized employees who access this company-internal information. “That’s sort of qualified data shopping,” Geckeis sums up. However, the biggest advantage is the multiple uses of data, analyses, and AI models: “It improves data consistency, increases trust among users, and productivity.”
The marketplace is aimed at data scientists and employees from the specialist departments. You could select the ready-made templates, datasets, and models and modify them for your purposes. The refinement of the models leads to higher data quality. “The models are easier to explain and their results more transparent,” “because the origin and use of the data and models are easy to check.”
The data governance tool Informatica Axon ensures that this use also conforms to laws such as GDPR and internal guidelines. Audits could trace planned as well as actual use.
“The digital business process transformation can only occur with uniform, secure, complete, and legally compliant data,.” In digital transformation, Informatica sees itself as a “trusted advisor” alongside its global and local business partners, the system integrators.
A User
As an example of increasing productivity, Informatica is used worldwide by the food box supplier HelloFresh in a so-called data mesh for demand forecasting. Predicting the rapid increase in demand for certain fresh foods in the wake of the pandemic is of great importance for the company’s performance and customer satisfaction. Who wants to deliver rotten food, let alone consume it?
Kai von Grambusch, Director of Data and Analytics at HelloFresh, combines time-to-market logistics data with marketing analyses to optimize the supply chain. The Enterprise Data Catalog classifies and documents data warehouse data, and with Informatica Axon Data Governance, the decentralized portal users can leverage terms, metrics, and collaboration. “With Informatica, we managed to deliver 600 million food boxes in 2020 and still save every employee two to three hours a week.”
The Cloud Data Marketplace is available via a consumption-based pricing model in the Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC).
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