Informatica has introduced a new set of solutions and enhancements for intelligent data lake management and enterprise data cataloging to improve regulatory compliance in the era of GDPR. The solutions also feature integration with Hortonworks Atlas and support for Cloudera Altus, expanding Informatica’s coverage across hybrid enterprise deployments, on premises and in the cloud.
The new solutions are being unveiled at Strata this week, where Informatica is also showcasing the latest version of many core components of the Informatica Intelligent Data Platform, powered by the CLAIRE engine, a metadata-driven AI technology. CLAIRE supports the Informatica portfolio and applies machine learning to technical business, operational and usage metadata.
Informatica Compliance Data Lake is a data lake management solution architecture that enables compliance analysts to build compliance reports which is especially important, the company says, with regulations such as the European Union’s GDPR, which will become effective in May 2018. Built on Informatica Intelligent Data Lake, Informatica Big Data Management, Informatica Enterprise Information Catalog and other Informatica technologies, the Compliance Data Lake enables a comprehensive view of compliance-related data from email, social media, instant messages, financial transactions, and other non-traditional sources.
The solution set supports regulatory compliance through intelligent data discovery, optimized data processing, support for collaborative and efficient human workflows, and self-service data preparation with AI and machine learning assisted automation and governance. Informatica delivers pre-built connectors and parsers to collect, process and deliver a variety of application and user data including unstructured data like emails and chats of ever increasing volume, and can deploy the solution in the cloud or on-premises
Observing that GDPR will move “from theory to reality” in the next few months, Ronen Schwartz, SVP & GM of Data Integration and Cloud Integration at Informatica, noted that the updated data lake management solution is aimed at supporting customers as they prepare to face the new regulatory challenges. Integrating key technologies, the Informatica Compliance Data Lake creates a map of all enterprise information, including technical metadata, business metadata, usage patterns spanning where data is being used and by whom, and operational metadata. A view of all four types of metadata is necessary to answer the regulation, said Schwartz.
In addition, Informatica has created GDPR definitions and a dashboard that is part of its security and regulation package to help highlight sensitive information and potential compliance issues, such as PII data moving from one geography to another. Going beyond the need to address GDPR requirements, Schwartz said, Informatica is offering the ability for business users and analysts to look into all the data in an organization through the data map to define rules and manipulation of the data, for example, to ensure that data, is being masked appropriately and to specify which users access certain datasets.
Metadata included in the Informatica data map is not only data from Informatica but from anywhere in the organization, said Schartz. As a solution for data integration on data lakes in the cloud, Informatica Big Data Management will now support Cloudera Altus, Cloudera’s platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering. Together, they combine the capabilities of Informatica’s data transformations with Cloudera’s platform-as-a-service for an end-to-end data lake management solution in the cloud. According to Schwartz, Informatica has supported multiple cloud options, including AWS, Azure, and Google, and with this announcement also makes Cloudera as a first line citizen from a metadata cloud perspective.
Similarly, with Informatica Intelligent Data Platform, Release 10.2, the company is providing an AI- and metadata-driven data catalog for discovering, understanding and managing all enterprise data wherever it resides, with rapid deployments on Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Powered by CLAIRE, the Informatica Enterprise Informatica Catalog can discover and catalog all types of data and data relationships across the enterprise, including both structured and unstructured data. Informatica Enterprise Informatica Catalog now supports Apache Atlas, Hortonworks’ open source big data governance framework, enabling data professionals to get visibility and lineage for all enterprise data outside of Hadoop and inside Hadoop-based data lakes.
GDPR emphasizes how important data is to any organization and the responsibility each must take to understand its data. GDPR requirements reach beyond IT and legal departments and cross different functions with organizations, said Schwartz. Moreover, he added, such regulations are increasingly being entertained by countries outside the EU. Switzerland is implementing similar restrictions and the UK and Australia are looking into their own regulations, he said.
For more information, visit www.informatica.com.