What Is Cloud Data Integration?
As the cloud frenzy grows, so too does the amount of cloud platforms and resources that organizations accumulate. It’s not uncommon for organizations to use a multicloud model, or a mixture of cloud-based systems. In fact, 58% of businesses are using some combination of AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, TechRepublic reports, while another 33% use a hybrid model, or a combination of public and private cloud. At the very least, a single organization can amass an abundance of cloud resources, such as Amazon S3 buckets, that create their own type of silos. Enter, cloud data integration.
Cloud data integration is the act of uniting all of these cloud-based system into an integral whole. Why? With good cloud integration, IT administrators can more efficiently oversee and secure the various cloud components of the organization. Without cloud data integration, IT administrators are left managing and maintaining the data from each system separately, leading to more inconsistencies and security risks. In order to implement cloud integration, organizations can build their own custom cloud integration platform, though many choose one of the many third-party cloud data integration tools.
Centralized Data Preparation: Cloud Data Integration for Business Users
Organizations shouldn’t stop at cloud data integration from an IT perspective. The principle of cloud data integration—that all cloud-based systems should be centrally managed—should expand to business users, as well. And for business users, one of the major pain points of working among multiple cloud-based systems is data preparation, or discovering, structuring, and cleaning the contents of data for various analytic outputs. Data preparation has long been considered the most challenging part of analytics. Organizations typically report that 80% of any data project is spent preparing data, while only 20% is left for analysis.
Much like cloud data integration, analysts don’t want to have to think about how to manipulate data in different ways across different environments. And they shouldn’t have to create different processes for different environments. Instead, what analysts need is a common interface for data preparation—an interoperable data preparation platform. This, like cloud integration, would allow business analysts their own sort of management of the data they need to use for various analytic projects, which more often than not is pulled from various cloud-based systems.
Designer Cloud’s Cloud Data Integration Consistencies
Like cloud data integration, Designer Cloud allows business users to prepare data seamlessly across all of their cloud-based systems. Regardless of the cloud-based system that a user is pulling from, three things remain consistent while using Designer Cloud:
- Common Metadata: Metadata is “data about the data” and needs to be consistent across all computing environments. Differing or conflicting metadata can be a roadblock to analysis, but an interoperable application like Trifacta uses a common framework and language for managing metadata, no matter where it is housed.
- Uniform Wrangling Logic: Organizations can use a variety of languages to create transformation logic. But when different languages are used, the potential for errors and inaccuracies rises dramatically. By utilizing a single language to prepare transforms and wrangle data across environments, logic can be saved, shared, and reused.
- Common User Experience: Interoperable solutions provide a user experience that remains consistent across computing environments and presents all data uniformly. The significance for the team? Not only does this mean getting away from custom scripts, but interoperable technology like Trifacta also enables end-users to only have to learn one technology. It’s easier for analysts to learn and use, allows for more team members to implement, and ultimately leads to a faster analytics process.
To learn more about the Designer Cloud data preparation platform and how it can help mirror your cloud data integration efforts by allowing your business users prepare data across all cloud-based systems, schedule a demo with our sales team.