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In this guest blog post, Mitesh Shah, Director – Cloud Product Management at Denodo, discusses how Denodo Platform offerings via Microsoft Azure Marketplace can help modernize your cloud data architecture and accelerate cloud adoption.
Businesses that are modernizing data warehouses or data lakes using Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics want simple, governed, more flexible hybrid cloud data integration. This is possible via a virtual data access/data delivery architecture powered by data virtualization, enabling real-time analytics with minimal data movement and zero data replication. Data virtualization is a modern, logical form of data integration; other approaches include extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes and change data capture (CDC).
No matter the size of the business, having a single source of truth is invaluable. Businesses have numerous tools and techniques at their disposal, making it more difficult to establish the right combination when it comes to the overall cost, time to implement, and skills required to establish a modern, digitally driven architecture as part of their cloud transformation journey.
The data virtualization approach integrates any kind of structured and unstructured data that is outside the data lake (Azure Synapse), across other cloud systems (in a multi-cloud deployment), or in a different geography to support compliance requirements in real time. This also eliminates the need for multiple tools to manage a variety of cloud services separately and provides the auto-scaling support to manage reporting and data integration workloads across a variety of data sources in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment.
Use cases for the data virtualization approach
Users normally think of their cloud migrations in terms of moving their data to the cloud. Yes, that’s an important aspect of any migration, and several bulk load tools can facilitate that. The challenge is minimizing any kind of business disruption to the numerous applications (business intelligence tools, application programming interface connectors, web services) that leverage the data sources that are migrating to the cloud, such as data warehouses or databases. Data virtualization can simplify migrations by introducing a virtual data access layer, which can not only minimize business disruption but also provide flexibility to organizations, enabling them to manage migrations at their own pace.
Here are some other example scenarios:
- Customer 360/single view of the data: Data virtualization can help by integrating the data from newer applications as part of merger and acquisitions activity. Organizations can combine all data across Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and more.
- Marketing and website analytics: Combine/consolidate all marketing data (from Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, Google Ads, LinkedIn) in one place, for better business insights.
- Business intelligence/reporting: Data virtualization makes analytics more effective by integrating the right data sets across multiple data repositories (Azure Synapse, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB).
- Sales and social media analytics: Data virtualization enables seamless Dynamics 365 CRM integration with a variety of other applications, such as ServiceNow, Google Analytics, Twitter data, and Azure Data Lake Storage, composed of CSV/XLS/Parquet files to drive intelligent campaigns and empower sales cycles with faster conversions and closings.
- Data marketplace and data as a service (DaaS or API management): Adopt a logical data architecture, which can help democratize all enterprise data while providing centralized control in a distributed data landscape. The web-based data catalog tool provides a single point for secure, enterprise-wide data access and governance. This facilitates the corporate data marketplace, which then provides visibility into the enterprise data ecosystem and enables data to be shared without compromising data security.
Common challenges to keep in mind
Businesses face a variety of challenges that could have a direct impact on their growth and investment:
- IT resource constraints/cost management: Not having a full-fledged IT team is quite common, and this is especially challenging when organizations are trying to enable self-serviceability. Managing a tight budget in a competitive environment is equally challenging.
- Siloed/disparate data: This is a common challenge, and while there are multiple ways to address it, such as building ETL pipelines and/or replicating data, many can result in high costs, latency, and other secondary challenges.
- Data security/compliance in the cloud: Without a centralized security layer, enabling such capabilities as Active Directory integration, data masking, data encryption, and row-and-column-based authorization to support General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other regulations can be a huge burden.
A self-service option in Azure Marketplace: Denodo Platform
Powered by data virtualization, the Denodo Platform addresses the key challenges above. It enhances data management in the cloud and streamlines many elements of this potentially complex journey.
Denodo recently announced two new offers, Denodo Professional and Denodo Standard, in Microsoft Azure Marketplace. They are targeted to mid-market users, to help them accelerate their SaaS integration and cloud adoption at an affordable cost using a pay-as-you-go model. Enterprise users can use Denodo Enterprise and Denodo Enterprise Plus offers to access advanced capabilities such as a full-featured data catalog and artificial intelligence/machine learning-powered query optimization for faster, more efficient BI reporting in the cloud.
Denodo is excited to offer a 30-day free trial of Denodo Professional via Azure Marketplace. After that, you pay only $6.27/hour for your data integration and management needs. Sign up to get in touch with our team about the offering, or you can start the free trial subscription directly from the marketplace. You can also take advantage of annual pricing via a private offer. All Denodo Platform offerings in Azure Marketplace are co-sell ready, and they enable you to start you cloud data integration journey in a self-service manner.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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