ChannelVision Magazine

EMERGENT The security play While most businesses today are sitting on top of a potential gold mine of insight, there’s also a tick- ing time bomb from a cybersecurity perspective. So there is a strong case to be made for using data catalogs to bolster cybersecurity. “There are offensive and de- fensive drivers surrounding data,” said Stan Christiaens, co-founder and chief technology officer at Collibra, which is now reselling Stillwood Technologies’ Safyr self-service metadata discovery software. “Companies are using data [to spur] growth. The other side is for defense. There are major regulatory considerations, with GDPR being one of the big- ger, more recent ones. “What we are seeing in the market is that customers are really struggling to handle data as a stra- tegic asset,” Christiaens added. “It has all the symptoms of a broken business process. People are trying to do things in spreadsheets and meetings, but really they are failing to solve key fundamental questions such as where is my data; what does it mean; where is it coming from; and how can I trust it?” This is a big problem, when considering the heavy fines and negative publicity that can result from a GDPR violation. According to the Information Commissioner’s Office, data protection complaints have more than doubled since the new GDPR rules were introduced back in May. Many businesses today are continuing to horde data, without the resources to effectively monitor and manage it. “There are certain processes that are quite easy and straightforward to do, and some things that are much harder,” Christiaens said. “The easy part comes when data lives in tra- ditional databases. The challenge is that applications have gotten so dominant that they are not allowing data to get out all that easily.” Silwood has the ability to dive deep into large application pack- ages and perform effective data governance, said the company. The technology enables businesses to discover and extract information that would otherwise go unseen, and from places that would be too difficult to enter. “Part of the challenge, particu- larly with a system like SAP, is how big these systems are,” explained Collibra chief operating officer Nick Porter. “SAP, for, instance, is by far the biggest in terms of its meta data footprint. A typical SAP sys- tem is around 90,000 tables and a million attributes.” Even for an expert, Porter added, it would be a very laborious task to manually mine those tables and move them into an environment such as Collibra. “We automate that process, making it much more accessible for people who aren’t an expert in something like SAP or another ap- plication,” he said. “We are seeing a great deal of interest from people that want to understand metadata that lives inside of Salesforce, as the plat- form has moved from being just a CRM system into a development platform,” said Porter. “Being able to do data governance work on a platform like Salesforce is now as equally as important as it would have been to something like SAP perhaps five years ago.” o Source: 451 Research Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions Current nd Planned Deployments Source: VIAVI Solutions Massive J Source: Chetan Sh 1 Petabyte equals 1,024 Terabytes or 1,048,576 Gigabytes 1 Exabyte equals 1,024 Petabytes Data Advantage Group Alation Collibra Informatica Smartlogic DATUM IBM Infogix Oracle Alex Solutions ASG Technologies Adaptive SAP Global IDs CHALLENGERS LEADERS VISIONARIES MICHE PLAYERS COMPLETENESS OF VISION ABILITY TO EXECUTE Source: Gartner, July 2018 Private Cloud Public Cloud Server Virtualization Software-Defined Networks Yes Yes, In 2019 Yes, In 2020 No 60% 12% 7% 21% 56% 11% 5% 28% 79% 6% 5% 10% 43% 19% 12% 26% Q1 14 Q2 14 Q3 14 US Netadds Channel Vision | September - October, 2018 18