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In my last post, I covered some of the latest best practices for enhancing data management capabilities in the cloud. Despite the increasing popularity of cloud services, enterprises continue to struggle with creating and implementing a comprehensive cloud strategy that involves an agile, real-time, and cost-effective data integration platform. 

Their top challenges are mainly tied to:

  • Security, with regard to data availability, accessibility, and visibility
  • The cost of data preparation and infrastructure management tied to cloud data lakes and data warehouses, where most of the data resides
  • The variety of skills needed to manage complex datasets via cloud services, in order to implement a modern data architecture

To address the above challenges, organizations need a robust, economical solution that aligns with business processes and can demonstrate ease-of-adoption in the form of components that can easily plug into the enterprise architecture. While there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all, the Denodo Platform provides the right set of hooks and techniques to bring hybrid cloud data together in a searchable, business-ready semantic layer that is well suited for advanced analytics and data science.


Fig 1. Denodo Platform Architecture.

The following use cases will illustrate several attractive ways to derive better value from data virtualization in the cloud.

  • Abstracting SaaS APIs in the Cloud: This enables traditional reporting tools to work with any kind of SaaS API. For example, for SQL-to-SaaS processes, data virtualization abstracts SaaS APIs (usually REST services) as part of a relational model and avoids replicating cloud data back to the data center.
  • Integrated Security for Cloud Sources: Data virtualization acts as a gatekeeper to the cloud, extending cloud sources with limited security features. This enables single sign-on (SSO) for external sources and the integration of local users and groups (LDAP, Windows AD) with cloud sources that do not offer such capabilities by default. It also enables fine-grained security such as column- and row-level restrictions, masking, and integration with cryptographic appliances.
  • Simplifying Cloud Migration, Data Warehouse Modernization,  Data Lake Creation, and Logical Data Warehousing: Data virtualization acts as a common access point for both internal and external data sources, providing a single schema with no replication: Virtual data lakes enable the combination of data across sources, regardless of type or location, enabling the definition of a common semantic model across disparate sources.
  • Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) and Data Science in the Cloud: Customers can now leverage the power of Denodo data catalog functionality to search and tag the right datasets for analytics and ML projects. This will also help data scientists to combine data stored in a virtual data lake and data virtualization layer to build models in a quick and easy manner, putting cloud elasticity to work, and using the data lineage capabilities of the Denodo Platform to access all of the data in a governed fashion.

The Denodo Platform for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides best-in-class data integration capabilities, enabling users to get started via a 14 days free trial on a cloud marketplace instance. The Denodo Platform enables users to build a semantic (data access) layer by connecting to structured and unstructured data sources and importing their metadata, which can then be leveraged to build the optimal data integrations.

The Denodo Platform does all of this without the need to replicate or move data. Users can start with as small as two data sources and grow up to ten to hundreds of them, with the flexibility to manage costs and scalability in the cloud. The upcoming version of the Denodo Platform, Denodo 8, will provide even better support in the form of a web-based administration UI; automated cloud deployments; new performance features, such as smart query acceleration for analytics; and a lot more.

Go ahead and kickoff the Denodo free trial in the cloud in less than 10 minutes.  What are you waiting for?

Mitesh Shah
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