[purchase_link id=”4662″ text=”Purchase” color=”blue”]

Analysis

At Informatica World 2014, Informatica debuted their latest technologies including Project Springbok. Springbok which, when generally available next fall, will provide access to corporate data on a self-service model. It provides a user-friendly way to provision` data from corporate and cloud data sources without intervention from IT organizations. Business users can then use their favorite analysis tools to analyze and visualize the data, even as it changes and the data model evolves.

The same capability is already in production for developers and QA personnel who need access to test data. Informatica’s Test Data Management (TDM) tools allow developers and testers to provision their own test sets from pools of data that has already been vetted as representative data while maintaining a high degree of security and privacy controls via data masking.

The Emerging Self-Service Trend

These new Informatica products are representative of an emerging trend in how data is delivered to end-users, no matter what their job function. Self-service allows end-users to perform their jobs better and faster without having to worry about IT bottlenecks. IT, on the other hand, only needs to become involved when queries are meant to be rolled out to production systems for more regular use.

The result of data self-service technology will be greater business agility, as business users no longer have to wait for IT specialists to deliver queries. Self-service will also allow for iterative evolution of data models by business analysts. It also promises to lower costs as fewer expensive IT resources – or fewer resources overall – are needed for data analysis, QA testing, and other tasks that require data consumption.

Guidance

IT organizations should be looking to self-service data delivery models today as a way to manage their own workloads while delivering better service to their internal customers at lower cost. Other users should demand these data self-service options since the current IT-centric model of data delivery reduces their access to timely data for analysis or other purposes.

Conclusion

Data self-service is an emerging trend that promises to remove IT bottlenecks which hamper both IT and business users. Informatica is taking steps to help IT deliver data self-service to all types of users. This should benefit their customers by enabling more agility in their businesses overall as well as within IT.

[purchase_link id=”4662″ text=”Purchase” color=”blue”]