What is Data Management?
Data management is a critical component of any business as it helps an organization identify, collect, store, and manage data to improve business outcomes. Data management spans the data landscape spanning applications, data warehouses, and data lakes. Due to the need for managing data spread across a heterogenous application landscape, data management is a complex task in every organization.
One vendor that has taken an intelligent approach to manage data is Informatica. Having been in the data management space for over 25 years, Informatica takes a platform approach to data management and brings a unified user experience across data management capabilities such as cataloging, data and process integration, data quality, master data management, data governance, and security. Informatica’s all-in-one approach helps organizations manage data no matter where it resides. Over the past decade, Informatica has made significant investments in a cloud-first, microservices-based architecture to help simplify data management. It has also invested heavily in AI and Machine Learning techniques through its AI-engine CLAIRE to help organizations achieve their data management goals.
How does Data Management work?
Data has gone through significant evolution from 1.0 to 4.0. Informatica has been throughout the journey starting from data 1.0 with the positioning of the traditional ETL type environment, data 2.0 with addition to the ETL data quality applying master data management together, data 3.0 starts with evaluating the AI-engine expanding out into big data environments, and data 4.0, by moving into a more cloud-native data platform. In the data 4.0 era, data is treated as a strategic asset and primarily enables entire businesses to be transformed through new business models and different business processes. The success of the business in the data 4.0 era depends on the company’s ability to manage and get value from data effectively.
How does Informatica work?
Informatica’s solution to data complexity is rooted in one of the company’s core values — platform centricity. After years of innovation, Informatica took its data management offering to new heights by launching Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC). Informatica is better positioned to assist clients in converting data into insightful knowledge at a level that is hard to achieve with point solutions by other vendors.
What is Informatica’s Cloud Data Management?
Informatica has always been at the forefront of data innovation. For businesses to thrive in this new world, a cloud dedicated to data management is required. Informatica offers the industry’s first and only cloud focused solely on data management: Informatica IDMC, the industry’s only end-to-end platform for data management and data-driven digital transformation.
The IDMC takes cloud-native to the next level, offering all services in a single platform for data and application integration, API integration, master data management, data quality, data security, and governance. It is the industry’s first and most comprehensive, cloud-native, AI-powered, end-to-end data management platform.
Benefits of Informatica
An AI-powered, microservices-based IDMC platform, able to scale with elastic and serverless processing helps organizations become more data-driven, develop more innovative products and services, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Informatica benefits include:
- Providing all data consumers with controlled, trusted, self-service access will increase workforce productivity.
- Boosting revenue and profitability by operationalizing AI models and improving their accuracy with high-quality, authoritative, trustworthy data.
- Boosting operational effectiveness by simplifying and streamlining processes.
- Reducing regulatory risk by ensuring the accuracy and protection of sensitive data.
- Increasing agility and resilience by enabling 360-degree views of relationships between customers, products, and suppliers across the business.
Cloud-native / AI-powered
Organizations can effortlessly scale all enterprise workloads with elastic and serverless processing. They can get faster insights by applying AI and ML to data and metadata.
Multi-cloud / multi-hybrid
Most organizations run on multi-cloud and multi-hybrid environments. They can run, interoperate, and support any combination of cloud and hybrid infrastructures.
Low code / no code
All data practitioners can be empowered with a low-code / no-code experience. Companies can get the highest level of security, data quality, data governance, and privacy.
Informatica Cloud Data Management journey
Informatica launched its CLAIRE data automation technology back in 2017, promising an Intelligent Data Platform that would bridge existing on-premise environments with new cloud environments using familiar data integration interfaces, tools, skills, and reusable code. From auto-scaling to anomaly detection, CLAIRE is made to handle a variety of operational, runtime, and automation use cases. It also serves as a wrapper for IDMC to enable completely automated data management and governance operations.
A slew of new features such as Cloud Data Integration (CDI) & Cloud Data Integration Elastic (CDI-E) offer more dynamic, scalable, flexible data integration, improving pushdown in AWS and enhanced Azure support.
Launch of iPaaS for multi-cloud, hybrid environments enabled with more automation and intelligence. The Cloud Data Integration suite is designed to promote agility and collaboration with a low-code or no-code experience allowing customers to go directly from idea to implementation.
The metadata and mapping of data integration across the cloud are unique to Informatica’s cloud. Data cataloging, scanning profile-derived enriched metadata and applying ML and AL to organize the data.
Metadata Knowledge Graph, which exists in earlier product iterations, helps users navigate this labyrinth of enterprise metadata in its cloud.
New partnerships with Oracle, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud to dominate the market for data management products by offering integrations that cut down the time and complexity of data migration, management, and engineering tasks.
The partnerships, boost the capabilities of the company’s IDMC platform and are in sync with the company’s recent data management product releases and previous partnerships with cloud software and service providers including AWS, Databricks, and Snowflake.
An excellent alternative to working with and maintaining a different solution on each cloud is an Informatica service that functions and appears the same across all clouds. For example, if an organization was doing data integration on all three clouds, they would need to work with Data Fusion (GCP), DataFactory (Azure), and Glue (AWS).
Why customers use Informatica for Cloud Data Management
A big data and analytics program’s success depends on managing data as a strategic asset. However, you need the appropriate tool optimized for the cloud. Customers utilize Informatica Cloud Data Management for six reasons:
1. Agility and time to value:
Informatica has brought market-leading data integration, data quality, and master data management tools into the hands of non-technical users to empower them with data-driven decision-making.
2. Cost savings through cloud delivery:
Informatica’s consumption-based licensing model gives organizations the choice of cost based on necessity.
3. Moving to cloud-based applications:
As many industries are moving towards cloud-based applications such as Marketo, Veeva, and Concur, Informatica is providing a platform to integrate with these applications providing its market-leading data management capabilities.
4. New use cases and users:
Cloud-based data management empowers business users to build their own data sets from disparate data to build meaningful, business-driven use cases to enforce data-driven organizational culture with a centralized, metadata-driven repository.
5. Security and manageability:
Informatica’s emphasis on security is clear in its data-masking solution. Their technology is HIPAA, ISO, and SOX compliant.
6. Unified User Experience
Informatica offers a metadata-driven, modular, artificial intelligence-based microservices architecture supporting a consistent and contemporary user experience across all iPaaS patterns that are designed for IT, developers, and business users.
Conclusion
With IDMC, Informatica has developed a value proposition that focuses on three key areas: platform agnosticism, linking together business and IT ecosystems, and infrastructure agnosticism.
By better aligning with forward-thinking trends in the cloud sector, such as industry customization, out-of-the-box integrations, and data democratization, the data management company is developing on these strategic pillars.
With these improvements in place and strong partnerships with other companies in the IaaS ecosystem, Informatica is well-positioned to help clients with the many on-premises workloads that are ready to be migrated and modernized in the cloud and to support the shift of the cloud-native enterprise from being digital to data-driven.
Stay tuned to Part 3 of the blog series to know more about how Informatica Cloud Data Management can help Organizations for a successful business transformation.
