Data governance solutions are evolving rapidly, but “in general, while these technologies are getting there, there are gaps in integration regarding the various data governance disciplines,” he added. “For instance, gaps exist between data catalogs and the actual enforcement of policies to protect personally identifiable information. Another gap can be found on the cultural side, where organizations are battling to embrace a data-driven future. Data ownership and data governance need to transform from our former IT-centered command and control to a federated, joint ownership between business and IT.”
MULTI-CLOUD AND PAAS
Cloud has been the major story for enterprises for many years, and now it is increasingly serving as a primary repository for data and associated analytics applications. The challenge is managing data environments across multiple clouds. “The chief data officer or chief information officer must put effort into how an organization ingests, integrates, and governs diverse data in hybrid or multi-cloud environments,” said Tapan Patel, senior manager for data management at SAS. “They expect cloud services to provide required data security, be deployed and compliant within their preferred cloud region, and be delivered through a hosted, containerized, or SaaS delivery mechanism.”
Multi-cloud environments also are making practices such as DataOps more viable. Emerging technologies focus on delivering data integration capabilities as cloud services for customers to design data pipelines once, then deploy them into their preferred infrastructure—on prem and/or on public cloud—to support hybrid processing,” said Patel. “From a processes standpoint, it’s imperative to manage all an organization’s data, as well as their governance policies, data quality, and security to bring trust and transparency into hybrid or multi-cloud environments.”
However, many aspects of cloud as they relate to data capabilities are still just being formulated. “Cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings are changing the way data is managed,” said Grant Fritchey, Redgate’s DevOps associate. “The technology itself is extremely advanced. The way data management can be done is extremely sophisticated. However, adoption within many organizations is still in its infancy.”
Progress is slow because “there’s still a lack of trust in cloud-based technologies in general, and even more so in the PaaS offerings,” Fritchey explained. “Because they take away things like servers and operating systems—even though that helps to increase the capabilities of the systems—people who are used to having those knobs to turn are unsettled and resist implementation, even today.”
Ultimately, cloud-based and PaaS systems are “moving the business away from being in the job of managing servers,” Fritchey added. “Lots of businesses really shouldn’t be doing that because, frankly, they’re not good at it. Also, as businesses continue the trend of hybrid work, cloud-based data management enhances their ability to deliver, even with a geographically distributed work force.”
ENTERPRISE BACKUP
Backup and restore has always been the bedrock of data management activities but with the rise of connectivity to enable data-driven initiatives, it has become more essential than ever to be able to ensure backup across a range of platforms and environments. “With assured access to data being increasingly important, enterprise data backup and recovery is a vital element for IT organizations,” said Dave Russell, vice president of enterprise strategy at Veeam.
“What we’ve seen in the pandemic is an expansion of workloads, meaning things aren’t going away. Organizations are adding new deployment methods, different types of new-age databases but still also have on-premise databases as well. With that—'enterprise’ is almost synonymous with ‘heterogeneity.’ It’s just the diversity of workloads.” Enterprise backup “has the daunting requirement of protecting modern/cloud-hosted workloads, enterprise applications, and traditional data center platforms,” Russell explained.