Data is the New Gold Medal. Make the Most of Your Data on AWS with Intelligent Data Cataloging and Governance

The Olympics and Paralympics are coming to close.  

After witnessing many of the competitions, I’ve asked myself “What drives the success of these athletes?"

Clearly, it is a combination of skill, training, and...data.

Data and data analysis guide the Olympians in understanding the competition.

Data is the new gold medal in any competition.

Unfortunately, only 24% of businesses ^[1]– down from 38% of businesses before the pandemic – would rate their organizations as data-driven today.

Only 32% of companies report that they can realize tangible and measurable value from data. ^[2]

Barriers to the Success of the Data-driven Journey

Increasingly, data is seen as a driver of operational agility and better business decisions and outcomes.

In Informatica’s conversations with its customers, everyone recognizes that data is a “strategic asset” that can drive a strong competitive advantage in the market. Their primary pain point, however, is the inability to extract value from the massive volumes of data due to:

• Data silos within IT systems, warehouses, data lakes, and applications
• Inability to discover relevant data and understand it
• A lack of visibility into the location of sensitive data and how it flows across the organization
• Less control over data format, data quality, and the level of business context, especially for data from sources outside of the business
• Multiple users without access and trust assurance for the data

To address the volume, variety, and velocity of data that is created, companies are migrating their analytics workloads to the cloud and modernizing their infrastructures and applications, with the goal of extracting value from the data with intelligent data management and governance.

Requirements for a Modern Data and Analytics Strategy

Building a modern data and analytics strategy with a faster return on value requires a cloud platform, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), that is secure, flexible, and cost effective. It must also scale to meet demand, while working seamlessly with an intelligent and complete data management cloud.

The Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an AI-powered, microservices-based cloud architecture dedicated to data management. 

With Informatica, organizations can accelerate their AWS modernization journey: from discovering, understanding, and curating their data to data-led migration and modernization of on-premises appliances to AWS, building new data warehouses or data lakes, centralizing and streamlining data integration patterns, and cleansing and ensuring the quality, understanding and governance of the data foundation on AWS.  

With industry-leading cloud data integration for ETL and ELT, application integration, data cataloging, data quality, master data management, and data governance, Informatica provides a trusted data management foundation to help organizations transform their businesses with better, data-driven decisions and outcomes.   

Understanding Your Data Begins with Data Discovery, Cataloging, Definition, Curation, Classification, and Lineage

With petabyte-scale data residing across Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3 and other on-premises and multi-cloud data sources, most businesses require in-depth, comprehensive information on:

• What data they have
• Where the data resides
• What the data means
• Who owns the data
• Who are the data subject matter experts
• Who can access the data
• How to enrich the data with business context
• Where the data is coming from and where it is being used
• What data transformations have occurred
• Whether the data is considered sensitive and should be handled appropriately and in compliance with policies/regulations
• Whether the data is certified and meets data quality, governance, and privacy policies

Intelligent, AI-powered, data cataloging and governance address these challenges.

Intelligent data cataloging enables you to discover and understand your data and build a comprehensive metadata repository regardless of where the data resides. Powered by the metadata-driven intelligence in the Informatica CLAIRE AI engine on which IDMC is built, intelligent data cataloging delivers advanced capabilities designed for rapid discovery and understanding of data at scale. With end-to-end automated data lineage and impact analysis, you can easily visualize, trace, and understand the flow of data within and outside AWS at a granular level. 

Data cataloging also is a foundational pillar for enforcing a holistic data-driven governance strategy for all your data sources regardless of wherever they may reside—from on-premises to hybrid- and multi-cloud environments.

Why? You need to be able to trust, not just discover, the data so your data stakeholders can access and utilize it as a trusted self-service to improve business decision-making and outcomes.

When marrying data cataloging and data governance, look for a solution that integrates into your existing data landscape and can scan hybrid sources like cloud data lakes and data warehouses, Analytics/BI systems, databases, ETL tools, and other enterprise systems.

With vast cloud data assets in cloud data lakes and data warehouses, use a solution that is cloud-native where infrastructure is available immediately and at exactly the scale needed so you can maximize your existing investments.

Automation is also critical for vast data ecosystems. Informatica’s cloud-native service within IDMC, Cloud Data Governance and Catalog, automates metadata extraction from heterogeneous sources, classification of data assets, and association of glossary terms to data. It can also infer relationships like joins and lineage among datasets using AI/ML capabilities like schema matching.

Combining the capabilities of data discovery, data lineage, profiling, business glossary creation, stakeholder, and policy management—as well as the ability to document and manage AI models and their implementations—Informatica’s AI-powered Cloud Data Governance and Catalog on AWS enables you to find, understand and trust your data so you can drive trusted business decisions and winning outcomes for all stakeholders in any business competition.

Next Steps in Your Data-Driven Journey

Take the next steps on your modernization journey with Informatica: Cloud Data Governance and Catalog,  Cloud Data Integration and Cloud Data Quality.

And start your data integration on AWS today with Informatica’s Cloud Data Integration Free Service  and process up to 500M rows of data/month for free.

_Sources

_{[1] Harvard Business review,  Why is it so hard to be data driven?} 

_{[2] Accenture, Closing the data value gap}