A major subsidiary of a global insurance and reinsurance company has more than 100 offices across six continents. In this post, I’d like to share this company’s experience with the Denodo Platform.
No Single Version of the Truth
The insurance/reinsurance giant wanted to build a semantic layer that could provide a consolidated view of its enterprise data, while reducing replication. To meet compliance requirements, the company also needed a governed data environment that could enable intercompany data transfers with a complete understanding of the data lineage, from source to destination. The company had a complex and diverse data landscape and different business groups used their own BI tools to access data.
The company had been relying on extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes to integrate the data, but this lead to excessive replication. This, in turn, lead to latencies in data delivery as well as inconsistencies between different data sets, creating multiple versions of the truth. As a result, outdated or unreliable figures were reported to stakeholders. The company also lacked data access control, as it had no way to trace who accessed what data, or when. Without role-based access rules, anyone could access any data, regardless of whether they had the authority. This made the company’s entire data management architecture extremely vulnerable to security breaches.
Data Virtualization in the Cloud
The company consolidated its enterprise data, which was stored in multiple policy management systems, into a central platform that was hosted on Azure. The Denodo Platform for Azure served as a business translation layer in this cloud architecture. It acted as a single semantic layer between all the consuming apps on one side, and all the data sources on the other. The Denodo Platform enabled the company to establish central data access, data governance, and security policies across its data infrastructure.
A Consolidated and Governed Data Landscape
The Denodo Platform acts as the single point of entry to all of the company’s different systems, eliminating the need for each consuming application to connect to the sources individually, and making the entire data architecture extremely nimble. This also greatly reduced the company’s need to replicate data, and it made the data available to business teams in real time, vastly improving the company’s business agility.
To learn more about how companies are leveraging data virtualization across numerous industries, see the collection of Denodo case studies.
