Aside from data, "governance" is the most used term in data governance. Duh! It's in the name, right? But not only is it the most used, it is also the most misused and misinterpreted. The general perception of the term "governance" generates a widespread misunderstanding of the purpose of data governance. With excitement and fear rapidly growing around the use of data in businesses across all industries, data governance is becoming a hotter-than-hot topic! But, as with many corporate buzzwords, the more viral the term and concepts of data governance become, the more inappropriately used and abused they are.
Posted May 11, 2018
Although security is often related to privacy, they are not synonymous. Data security can be defined as the set of policies and techniques to ensure the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of data at all times. Data privacy refers to the fact that the parties accessing and using the data do so only in ways that comply with the agreed-upon purposes of data use in their roles. These purposes can be expressed as part of a company's policy, but are also subject to legislation. In this way, several aspects of security can be considered as necessary instruments to guarantee data privacy.
Posted May 11, 2018
Write this down: Converged transactional and analytical data platforms stand for digital business. None of us has been alive long enough to remember a time without the printing press, but such a time did once exist. The printing press revolutionized the world of books, journalism, scientific research, and countless other areas by automating a process that was once tedious and time consuming.
Posted May 11, 2018
Architecting the Modern Enterprise: 10 Key Technologies for a Strong Foundation
Posted May 11, 2018
As the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Many companies have been in a frenzy the past 2 years preparing for regulations that are either turning or about to turn the corporate world upside down. Financial services firms have been scrambling to deliver the transparency required by the second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II), while everyone else serving EU residents has been lining their ducks in a row to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Posted May 11, 2018
If blockchain could only be described in one word, that word would be "trust." It is an ideal mechanism to establish trust among multiple parties, demonstrated by its seminal use case as an abstraction for currency. The currency paradigm is instructive because it demonstrates the core concepts that could be leveraged in other use cases.
Posted May 11, 2018
Enterprise architects are making major waves. In fact, a recent KPMG study spotlighted enterprise architecture (EA) as today's most in-demand tech skill, as companies recognize EA's critical role in cutting both costs and complexities. But while enterprise architecture is one of the fastest-growing skillsets, it's also undergoing a major evolution. Where the role previously involved exhaustive plans consisting of excessive amounts of analysis, slow timelines, and rigid conceptual models, the agility and DevOps movement has forced old EA mentalities into obsolescence.
Posted May 11, 2018
The Next Wave of Big Data Technologies
Posted May 11, 2018
We're all familiar with the IT "war room" scenario. When there's an issue, members of the IT team come together to troubleshoot and find a solution. For organizations with important applications, such as SQL Server running in virtual infrastructures, these IT teams are no strangers to the IT war room environment. In this case, input from the SQL Server system administrators and DBAs isn't considered (or even requested) when the infrastructure team implements it virtualization plan.
Posted May 07, 2018
GDPR has gone into effect. Rex Ahlstrom, chief strategy and technology officer at BackOffice Associates, a provider of information governance and data stewardship solutions, discussed what's at stake.
Posted May 01, 2018
Recently, the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directions (MiFID II) launched in the EU. The sweeping regulatory changes will impact transaction reporting on all financial instruments traded in Europe and affect all U.S. firms that do business with European counterparts or customers. Firms will face new requirements in tracking data—including emails, texts, and documents related to every transaction—and will need to be able to quickly reconstruct trades and search across data silos, presenting a significant challenge. Here, Ken Krupa, CTO at enterprise database company MarkLogic, discusses the impact to U.S. firms, and how new regulations underscore the importance of increasing transparency, consumer protection, and data integrity.
Posted April 30, 2018
DataStax is making enhancements to its DataStax Enterprise platform, making upgrades to deliver twice the responsiveness and the ability to handle twice the throughput on the same infrastructure. DataStax Enterprise (DSE) 6 allows customers to maintain hybrid cloud flexibility with all the benefits of a distributed cloud database on any public cloud or on-premises. DSE 6 includes all the advantages of Apache Cassandra and much more.
Posted April 18, 2018
As the volume and complexity around data grows, it has become more critical than ever for organizations to develop a deep knowledge of their business context and to understand and quantify the value of that data.
Posted April 18, 2018
The key to understanding AI's current and future impact is its transformation of business processes. A widespread misconception is that AI systems, including advanced robotics and digital bots, will gradually replace humans in one industry after another. Self-driving vehicles, for example, will one day replace taxi, delivery, and truck drivers. That may be true for certain jobs, but what we've found in our research is that, although AI can be deployed to automate certain functions, the technology's greater power is in complementing and augmenting human capabilities.
Posted April 13, 2018
Turning Data into Insights: Q&A with Snowflake Computing's Christian Kleinerman
Posted April 09, 2018
What Will It Take to Be a DBA in the Future?
Posted March 28, 2018
You are one of the few and the brave—you have not only established a successful data governance program, you have done so and lived to tell the tale. But, while your brow is still wet and your sleeves are rolled up, your program could be crumbling and you might not even see the warning signs.
Posted March 27, 2018
Data, data, data. With the exponential data growth that has occurred in the last 15 years, a need has arisen to sift through that data to find answers to questions.
Posted March 26, 2018
On any given day, organizations can collect hundreds of different pieces of data on every person they interact with. Managing and protecting this data, often referred to as personal data, is becoming mission-critical for organizations—particularly since enforcement of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) begins on May 25, 2018.
Posted March 26, 2018
There is a data revolution happening across the globe. From academics to politics, and everywhere in between, the world's stories are being told through their datapoints. And, while using visualization to tell stories about data is by no means new, we are now telling them in more influential and impactful ways than ever before. Charts and graphs created 5 years ago in Excel are far different than the incredible visuals we are now producing with best-of-breed tools such as Tableau, or scripting with dynamic JavaScript libraries such as D3.js
Posted March 26, 2018
We live in a new world today, with unique challenges heretofore unseen in information technology. To remain at the expected technological apex, organizations should ask themselves these questions.
Posted March 26, 2018
Many organizations nowadays are struggling with the quality of their data. Data quality (DQ) problems can arise in various ways. Common causes of bad data quality include multiple data sources; limited computing resources: Lack of sufficient computing resources; changing data needs; and different processes using and updating the same data.
Posted March 26, 2018
In the IoT world, devices are moving from smart to intelligent due to the advent of artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, this is now hindered due to the natural limitations of the cloud. In order to progress, devices need lower latency, a higher level of independence, and better connectivity.
Posted March 26, 2018
The rise of DevOps, which promises to bring development and operations teams into alignment, is bringing database managers and administrators ever closer to the key touchpoints of their businesses. DevOps seeks to ensure the continuous delivery and consistent cadence of software releases and means that data professionals will have a key role to play in their organizations' information technology strategy. It's not happening a moment too soon—nimble, tech-savvy competitors have learned to leverage data as strategic business assets and are biting ever deeper into just about every existing market.
Posted March 22, 2018
Does this sound familiar? You have a backlog of apps that your workforce is craving, and you simply don't have the team (or the time) to build them. In fact, the demand for apps is growing five times faster than IT's capacity to deliver them. This crunch is probably all too familiar for many, and it's forcing IT teams to find new ways to accelerate app development. The age-old question is, do you build, do you buy, or do you do something in between?
Posted March 13, 2018
Big data can help drive decisions in almost every aspect of our lives—from the way financial products are underwritten, learning programs are designed, energy is used, healthcare diagnoses are made, insurance rates are assessed, commerce is conducted, and fraud is prevented—the list is infinite. As these decisions can affect individuals and society as a whole, it is compulsory that data experts apply integrity, transparency, and due diligence into the analytics that mine information and the algorithms that inform our decision making and problem solving.
Posted March 13, 2018
With data lakes being so new to organizations, an early failure can significantly set back the opportunity to fundamentally transform analytics. However, while the potential for big data innovation is significant, organizations are mired with slow, manual, and time-consuming processes for managing the tasks that turn raw big data into relevant business assets and insights. Without addressing these challenges in a systematic way, organizations find that data lake projects turn into labor-intensive, complex endeavors.
Posted March 08, 2018
Websites and the servers that host them are vulnerable to attack, and so too are the networks that are connected to them. Security holes in sites created by human error or application vulnerabilities are a source of trouble for the entire enterprise.
Posted March 08, 2018
Graph databases are increasingly popular. In fact, according to DB-Engines graphs are the fastest growing of any database category since 2013. This growth is fueled in part because many organizations are realizing the value of understanding connections in their data. For companies looking to use a graph database to build behavior and decision-making applications based on real-time evaluation of connected data, there are several key attributes, including integrity, performance, efficiency and scalability.
Posted March 07, 2018
The Changing Role of the Modern DBA: Cloud, NoSQL, and Automation
Posted March 05, 2018
Private equity firm Parallax Capital Partners acquired erwin Data Modeler software from CA Technologies in April 2016. Since then, operating as erwin, Inc. and led by IT industry veteran Adam Famularo, the company has rebranded itself as "the data governance company," launched new products, and made a number of strategic acquisitions—including most recently Rome-based A&P Consulting. Famularo spoke with BDQ about the changes at erwin over the past 2 years and shared his views on where the IT market overall is headed.
Posted February 28, 2018
Good News: Your Database is About to be Autonomous!
Posted February 21, 2018
Qubole, the cloud big data-as-a-service company, is teaming up with Snowflake Computing, a data warehouse built for the cloud, enabling organizations to use Apache Spark in Qubole with data stored in Snowflake. With the new integration between cloud services, data teams are able to build, train, and put in production machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) models in Spark using information stored in Snowflake.
Posted February 14, 2018
CloudJumper, provider of a workspace as a service platform for agile business IT, has acquired privately held IndependenceIT (IIT), a provider of WaaS enablement software for automating the deployment of applications, data, and complete workspaces in the cloud.
Posted February 13, 2018
The Changing Role of the Modern DBA in a Big Data World
Posted February 05, 2018
MongoDB 3.6 is now Generally Available (GA), and ready for production deployment. In this short blog series, I'll be taking you on a whirlwind tour of what's new in this latest release:
Posted January 31, 2018
The Changing Role of the Modern DBA - New Skills for Security
Posted January 22, 2018
Cybersecurity and terms written about it, such as "ransomware," "malware," and "hacker" have become part of our regular vocabulary. Concerns about protecting our identities and personal data are on the rise in our day-to-day lives. With the onslaught of news reports about data breaches and various hacks, the awareness is more elevated now than it has been in the past few years.
Posted January 11, 2018
Emerging technologies are outpacing data governance at a rapid clip. Specifically, the rate of growth and development of emerging technologies in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning (ML) drastically exceeds the current speed and willingness of businesses to change their governance models to manage and protect their data and information assets. Unfortunately, the larger the delta becomes between the advancements in technology and the changes in governance, the greater the risks and losses for the business.
Posted January 09, 2018
As the use of cloud expands as a database platform and automated capabilities increase, there are new opportunities for DBAs to move beyond operations and emergency fire-fighting and instead get involved in more innovative, high-level tasks that bring additional value to their organizations. Experts weigh in on what's ahead.
Posted January 08, 2018
A lot has been written about why IoT is going to be absolutely essential to your company. If you are convinced as to the why but wonder about the how, pay attention. Based on all the lessons learned from my engagements around the globe, I am going to tell you how. It basically comes down to three basic phases: preparation, the "real stuff," and embedding it in the organization.
Posted January 08, 2018
In a world where new technologies are often presented to the industry as rainbows and unicorns, there is always someone in a cubicle trying to figure out how to solve business problems and just make these great new technologies work together. The truth is that all of these technologies take time to learn, and it also takes time to identify the problems that can be solved by each of them.
Posted January 05, 2018
As Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator, has put it: "Hacking and painting have a lot in common … [hackers and painters] they're both makers." And as modern-day artists, developers will help create the future of cognitive computing and AI. New technology has granted them more paints and more materials with which to paint and sculpt. It will allow them to create works of art never previously envisioned, that are powered by big datasets and cognitive systems. But they can't go it alone. Even da Vinci had his patrons. That leads to the next logical questions. How should organizations support their developers right now? And where should they place resources to ensure their developers reap the greatest benefits from cognitive technologies?
Posted January 04, 2018
The suddenness of the non-relational "breakout" created a lot of noise and confusion and—at least initially—an explosion of new database systems. However, the database landscape is settling down, and in the past few years, the biggest meta trend in database management has been a reduction in the number of leading vendors and consolidation of core technologies. Additionally, we're starting to see database as a service (DBaaS) offerings become increasingly credible alternatives to on-premise or do-it-yourself cloud database configuration.
Posted January 03, 2018
A New Age: AI and Machine Learning Meet the Cloud
Posted January 03, 2018
GDPR Crosses the Pond
Posted January 02, 2018
With cyberattacks on the rise and the EU's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) going into effect in 2018, there is a greater focus on data security and governance. Here six top IT leaders reflect on the changes taking place and offer their predictions for data security and compliance in 2018.
Posted December 13, 2017
Using Web Scraping as a Data Science Tool
Posted December 04, 2017
Databricks, provider of a Unified Analytics Platform and founded by the team who created Apache Spark, has become a partner with Microsoft to expand the reach of its Unified Analytics Platform and address customer demand for Spark on Microsoft Azure.
Posted November 29, 2017
Getting Ready for GDPR
Posted November 28, 2017