Industry publications and thought leaders have been touting the benefits of composable design for both business and architecture.
Andy Vidan, CEO and co-founder, Composable Analytics talked “Composable Design Patterns,” during his session at Data Summit 2023.
The annual Data Summit conference returned to Boston, May 10-11, 2023, with pre-conference workshops on May 9.
For roughly 10 years, Composable Analytics has been ahead of the curve. The company was founded on using composable design strategies to get actual projects up and running and providing value for clients, Vidan explained.
DataOps is not ETL, Vidan said, there’s more to this concept. The end goal is to develop data intensive applications that have to handle and process large volumes of data and its entire lifecycle. It should ultimately serve up results at a high scale.
Data intensive applications that Composable Analytics has worked on include ML-enabled, high-throughput document processing and payments; an AI underwriting engine for straight-through processing; geospatial intelligence platform for mineral exploration.
“Our customers are able to deploy these within months,” Vidan said.
Modern data architecture is messy and complicated, and isn’t an improvement from the way things were done 20 years ago, he said.
A composable architecture is built on top of a scalable cloud with a data lake, a data vault, or semantic layer that powers microservices, APIs, and multiple intensive applications.
“DataOps is about having these processes automated and managed within a framework,” Vidan said.
Geoff Rennie, master pre-sales engineer, data protector, OpenText, discussed “Recovery From a Data Emergency.”
Rennie discussed whether to copy, replicate, mirror, image, and/or back-up your data; the different data recovery options; the advantages and disadvantages of each option; when to use and when to avoid them.
“Ransomeware attacks are growing at an ever-increasing rate,” Rennie said. “And they’re getting smarter.”
Ransomeware payments have increased more than 311% from 2019 to 2020, he cited from the Wall Street Journal. The average ransomeware payment reached $847K in 2020, he said. And the types of extortion have quadrupled.
Attacks can come from emails, exploits which are vulnerabilities within software and systems that gain unauthorized access, mobile phones, and more.
The biggest threats are old vulnerabilities for unpatched enterprise systems. These vulnerabilities allow an attacker to gain initial access, achieve persistence, escalate privileges, evade defenses, access credentials, and discover assets they were looking for, he explained.
“Why do they want your data? Just because they can,” he said.
Security programs start with a structure to understand what should be protected. To determine how protection policies should be implemented find the cost to the business if that asset were lost.
As an organization it is imperative to try to protect every point of access. Successful backups are the last line of defense against attacks.
“Keep it simple and safe,” he said.
Many Data Summit 2023 presentations are available for review at https://www.dbta.com/DataSummit/2023/Presentations.aspx.