Google Cloud Dataprep recently passed the one-year mark as a generally available product and we’re continuing to aggressively invest in the service based on customer feedback. As our customers’ usage of Cloud Dataprep grows, we want to make sure our product grows with it by continuing to add new functionality to bolster repeated use of Cloud Dataprep within organizations that have developed extensive use cases and enterprise-wide adoption.
Cloud Dataprep is the product of a deep partnership with Google, years of hard work and thousands of users from leading businesses such as Whirlpool, Premier Inc., Woolworths, Travis Perkins, that have powered our development efforts since the GA launch in September 2018. These early adopters have run millions of data prep jobs leveraging Cloud Dataprep’s native integration with Dataflow for analytics initiatives on BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage. Their feedback has been invaluable to the continued evolution of the service. It’s one of our company values at Alteryx (formerly Trifacta) —“start with the user”—and we will continue to iterate and build new capabilities into the product based upon customer usage.
With Google Cloud Next UK coming along, we want to offer our Cloud Dataprep ever-growing community a sneak peek into our roadmap that may translate into multiple editions of Cloud Dataprep to respond adequately to distinct organization’s maturity and requirements. Stop by our booth F16 for an opportunity to see live these new capabilities or by arranging a meeting with one of our specialists.
So, what’s cooking with Cloud Dataprep on the Google Cloud?
Extended Connectivity
One of the top requests we hear from Cloud Dataprep users is the ability to work with data outside of Cloud Dataprep’s BigQuery and Cloud Storage connectors. And this didn’t necessarily come as a surprise—increased connectivity is a huge step toward self-service since data analysts wouldn’t need an intermediary to move the data for them. New Cloud Dataprep options will give connectivity to relational databases, business applications and extend our integrations across Google Cloud with Google Sheets.
Enterprise Scale Operationalization
It’s not uncommon for large organizations to have numerous environments with distinct configurations that span multi-cloud and on-premise which can make operationalizing data preparation tasks across these configurations difficult. Future-looking Cloud Dataprep versions will offer software life cycle development (SDLC) for analytics applications with capabilities such as recipe export and import, custom configuration, or specific performance tuning.
Multi-Cloud Support
One clear trend across all large organizations is that their environments span across multiple cloud and on-premises services. To reflect this reality, Cloud Dataprep will be offering the ability to move data preparation recipes across different Trifacta editions from and to Cloud Dataprep and the other major cloud providers. This is a significant breakthrough to support the organization’s multi-cloud strategies.
Pipeline Management:
In addition to some of the more common tasks you might think of when you hear “data preparation” (profiling, standardizing, etc.), the term also includes monitoring end results. In other words, what happens next? This could be alerting stakeholders of given outputs or conditional orchestration, and certainly includes thorough error management. Cloud Dataprep’s coming versions will offer users to effortlessly schedule data checks and flag errors so that any outputs used for downstream analytics are trusted.
Advanced Security and Extended Support
Some organizations—particularly those in regulated industries like financial services or pharmaceuticals—have additional security requirements beyond the significant security already provided by GCP and Cloud Dataprep by default, such as privatizing their cloud with custom data encryption or limiting access to a controlled group of users. Cloud Dataprep will expand on current security standards with with seamless support for advanced security configuration.
For example, Virtual Private Cloud – Service Controls (VPC-SC) allows organizations to isolate data preparation projects and whitelist IP addresses to provide fine grained access to Cloud Dataprep. Customers can manage their data more securely with Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK), which enable organizations to manage their own data encryption with Google Cloud.
To help support customers with these advanced features, we’re also planning to provide customized terms & conditions, access to Trifacta Support 24×5 Global, and a specialized specific training package.
What’s Ahead
Demand for Google Cloud Dataprep continues to grow, and we’re excited to meet that demand with continuous innovation and new options that customers would be able to upgrade to. Take Woolworths, for example, a major grocery store chain in Australia that will be able to expand their usage of Cloud Dataprep in order to onboard more data sources and build more manageable end-to-end workflows.
“With over a thousand stores and hundreds of thousands of employees, Woolworths Australia requires careful planning and optimization of our facilities to maximize returns. Every step to produce useful data insights, from data collection to advanced analytics, influence significantly the company’s strategy,” says Radha Goli, lead data engineer at Woolworths. “With Cloud Dataprep new capabilities, such as orchestration, the addition of new connectors, and enterprise operationalization, we’ll be able to deploy Cloud Dataprep more broadly and guarantee repeatable and trustworthy data outcomes to inform our business.”
Demand for data preparation, however, also extends beyond Google Cloud. Today’s organizations acknowledge that thorough data preparation is a necessity for trusted analytics and that modern data preparation platforms are the first, critical step toward self-service analytics. At Trifacta, we offer our data preparation capabilities across all major cloud and on-premise environments to meet organizations where their data lives. We’re proud to be recognized as the leading data preparation vendor not just in the cloud or on Google Cloud, but everywhere.
To learn more about Cloud Dataprep, sign up for a trial. And once again, all Google Cloud NEXT UK attendees are welcome to a free preview of the new capabilities by contacting a member of our team to arrange a meeting or stopping by our booth (F16). See you there!