Leveraging the value of data through sophisticated and secure sharing, collaboration, and governance technologies represents the next phase – and one of the most important payoffs – of IT modernization, officials from data warehouse provider Snowflake and cloud data integration service provider Talend said July 8 during a webinar hosted by MeriTalk.
The complimentary one-hour webinar, “Data Building Blocks: Tools for Collaboration and Cooperation,” is available to watch on-demand now.
Nicholas Speece, Chief Federal Technologist at Snowflake, and Kevin Ware, Director Solutions Engineering, East and West at Talend, demonstrated how services provided by both companies can be used to map pathways through data sharing capabilities, improve analytical capabilities and insights, and harness the far-reach capabilities of modern data management technologies.
Ware discussed the ongoing “explosion of data in the marketplace,” the increasingly disparate sources of data that Federal agencies have to get their arms around, and the challenges of accessing data streams in a “governed manner.”
For years, Speece said, Federal agency data has been gathered and stored in restrictive silos that make collaboration more difficult. But “now that collaboration has gained prominence” in the market, “we see that the data explosion is blocking the pipeline” for agencies that aim to generate better value from their data.
“It’s where we need to focus in the next phase of IT modernization over the next 5-10 years,” Speece said. “We are already well on the way to revolutionizing how we treat data,” he said, adding, “our focus now is how to use all of those data pipelines” to generate better intelligence for Federal agencies.
Meeting the challenge of getting more value from complex data streams comes amid changing roles within Federal agencies aimed at that same goal, including the new wave of Federal chief data officers and data protection officers. “All of them want access to the data,” he emphasized.
Those trends, he said, are also likely to lead to new data regulations, “and we want to make sure we are handling this for you,” Ware said.
The combined Snowflake/Talend solution puts structure around data, and provides for access and sharing of data within “governance and trust frameworks” required by the Open Data Act. “These are the things that we need to build into our Federal agencies of the future,” Speece said.