Ensuring Business-Critical Data Is Trusted, Available, and Secure with Informatica on Microsoft Azure

Ever since connected personal computers became the standard for business operations in the late 20^th century, businesses have prioritized disaster recovery and uptime for business-critical applications. The cloud explosion of this decade has heightened this sensitivity, as data-driven functional access for consumers and partners has become as important as employee access itself to a company’s success. The technical solutions built by Microsoft into Microsoft SQL Server and the powerful Microsoft Azure cloud platform go a long way to ensure that data remains accessible and available to drive your business.

But this leaves one important question… is this highly available data that is driving your customer and business decision-making trusted, authenticated, and secure? Does the data come from an untrustworthy source, or is it misaligned with other information from within your organization? Are you accidentally exposing protected and personal information without knowing it? How do you know that all this information is any good?

Luckily, Informatica works with Microsoft and is its 2020 Data and Analytics Partner of the Year, to answer this very question. Our intelligent, automated solutions, powered by AI and cutting-edge technologies, address the entire scope of data management issues that gives our joint customers the ability to focus and drive their business success in any industry and place around the world. Whether you are migrating and modernizing your business-critical applications into Azure, or if you are taking a close look at the applications that are already there, I encourage you to think about the following questions.

Where is my data coming from?

How many times have we heard “I don’t believe what’s in the report” or “the system is showing the wrong information”? Regardless of whether these statements are true or not, the perception undermines faith in your systems, and puts your key user base in a position of working with data they do not trust or understand. Informatica’s platform addresses this challenge head-on by combining our powerful CLAIRE AI engine and metadata foundation with connectivity to over 250 source systems to track down where information comes from and then tie that data lineage information to the data itself. Armed with this information, IT and Business can leverage Informatica’s industry-leading Enterprise Data Catalog in the market to drive informed discussions about the reliability and security of the information they rely upon the most.

Is my data comprehensive and connected?

One of the biggest challenges of the cloud data explosion is that businesses become overwhelmed with data from so many sources that this information can easily become disconnected and siloed. Different systems use different abbreviations, capture different sets of data, use different table names, have different data spellings, etc., while users set up their own one-off reporting structures separate from the overall corporate strategy. With sources spread all over your IT landscape, it can be easy to miss insights in your business-critical applications when the various user and development groups driving the requirements do not realize the full picture. Informatica’s Intelligent Data Platform again shines in this environment, by using metadata-driven artificial intelligence to identify systems that appear to be referencing the same data landscape and providing cloud-native data integration tools that allow you to associate this data together in new platforms, such as Azure Data Lake Storage or Azure Synapse Analytics. This powerful combination provides a robust and comprehensive platform on which to build your mission-critical applications.

Are we managing and nurturing the data?

One of the greatest benefits of Informatica’s Intelligent Data Platform is its end-to-end integration. By understanding data lineage and the systems that are impacted by this information, our tools provide an easy way to establish data quality and data governance mechanisms that help you establish validation rules, identify data sources that violate them, and implement a management chain that makes it clear who is accountable for monitoring, maintaining, and evolving each data source. Collaborative capabilities allow people to rate the quality of the data they receive in their reports and applications, thereby providing incredible insights and warning indicators with respect to the data that is being used to drive business decisions throughout the organization. And of course, by maintaining strong data quality throughout, business-critical applications become even more useful, and feature requests or new development efforts can continue with an eye towards driving stronger business outcomes.

Informatica has a long history of working with Microsoft to help businesses across every industry – including Public Sector, Healthcare, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Retail, and many others – to overlay our trusted data management platform that powers the mission critical application that keep these companies running. We continue to drive innovation that complements and extends each platform, ensuring that your investments on our technologies continue to pay improving dividends each and every year. If you are concerned about the quality of the data that is powering your mission-critical applications, and your company is focused on cloud data warehouse modernization, data governance and privacy, or Business 360 initiatives, I encourage you to come find out more at www.informatica.com/azure. Learn more about business-critical applications on Azure or read the Microsoft blog.