Databases

Securing Your Data With Actian Vector, Part 1

Martin Fuerderer

December 3, 2024

image showing a person securing data with actian vector

The need for securing data from unauthorized access is not new. It has been required by laws for handling personally identiﬁable information (PII) for quite a while. But the increasing use of data services in the cloud for all kinds of proprietary data that is not PII now makes data security an important part of most data strategies.

This is the start of a series of blog posts that take a detailed look at how data security can be ensured with Actian Vector. The first post explains the basic concept of encryption at rest and how Actian Vector’s Database Encryption functionality implements it.

Understanding Encryption at Rest

Encryption at rest refers to encryption of data at rest, which means data that is persisted, usually on disk or in cloud storage. This encryption can be used in a database system that is mainly user data in tables and indexes, but also includes the metadata describing the organization of the user data. The main purpose of encryption at rest is to secure the persisted data from unauthorized direct access on disk or in cloud storage, that is without a connection to the database system.

The encryption can be transparent to the database applications. In this case, encryption and decryption is managed by the administrator, usually at the level of databases. The application then does not need to be aware of the encryption. It connects to the database to access and work with the data as if there is no encryption at all. In Actian Vector, this type of encryption at rest is called database encryption.

Encryption at the application level, on the other hand, requires the application to handle the encryption and decryption. Often this means that the user of the application has to provide an encryption key for both, the encryption (e.g. when data is inserted) and the decryption (e.g. when data is selected). While more complicated, it provides more control to the application and the user.

For example, encryption can be applied more ﬁne grained to speciﬁc tables, columns in tables, or even individual record values in table columns. It may be possible to use individual encryption keys for diﬀerent data values. Thus, users can encrypt their private data with their own encryption key and be sure that without having this encryption key, no other user can see the data in clear text. In Actian Vector, encryption at the application level is referred to as function-based encryption.

Using Database Encryption in Actian Vector

In Actian Vector, the encryption that is transparent to the application works at the scope of a database and therefore is called database encryption. Whether a database is encrypted or not is determined with the creation of the database and cannot be changed later. When a database is created with database encryption, all the persisted data in tables and indexes, as well as the metadata for the database, is encrypted.

The encryption method is 256-bit AES, which requires a 32 byte symmetric encryption key. Symmetric means that the same key is used to encrypt and decrypt the data. This key is individually generated for each encrypted database and is called a database (encryption) key.

To have the database key available, it is stored in an internal system ﬁle of the database server, where it is protected by a passphrase. This passphrase is provided by the user when creating the database. However, the database key is not used to directly encrypt the user data. Instead, it is used to encrypt, i.e. protect, yet another set of encryption keys that in turn are used to encrypt the user data in the tables and indexes. This set of encryption keys is called table (encryption) keys.

Once the database is created, the administrator can use the chosen passphrase to “lock” the database. When the database is locked, the encrypted data cannot be accessed. Likewise, the administrator also uses the passphrase to “unlock” a locked database and thus re-enable access to the encrypted data. When the database is unlocked, the administrator can change the passphrase. If desired, it is also possible to rotate the database key when changing the passphrase.

The rotation of the database key is optional, because it means that the whole container of the table keys needs to be decrypted with the old database key to then re-encrypt it with the new database key. Because this container of the table keys also contains other metadata, it can be quite large and thus the rotation of the database key can become a slow and computationally expensive operation. Database key rotation therefore is only recommended if there is a reasonable suspicion that the database key was compromised. Most of the time, changing only the passphrase should be suﬀicient. And it is done quickly.

With Actian Vector it is also possible to rotate the table encryption keys. This is done independently from changing the passphrase and the database key, and can be performed on a complete database as well as on individual tables. For each key that is rotated, the data must be decrypted with the old key and re-encrypted with the new key. In this case, we are dealing with the user data in tables and indexes. If this data is very large, the key rotation can be very costly and time consuming. This is especially true when rotating all table keys of a database.

A typical workﬂow of using database encryption in Actian Vector:

Create a database with encryption:
1. 1. ```
  createdb -encrypt <database_name>
```

This command prompts the user twice for the passphrase and then creates the database with encryption. The new database remains unlocked, i.e. it is readily accessible, until it is explicitly locked or until shutdown of the database system.

It is important that the creator of the database remembers the provided passphrase because it is needed to unlock the database and make it accessible, e.g. after a restart of the database system.

Lock the encrypted database:
1. 1. Connect to the unlocked database with the Terminal Monitor:
```
sql <database_name>
```
  2. SQL to lock the database:
```
DISABLE PASSPHRASE '<user supplied passphrase>'; \g
```

The SQL statement locks the database. New connect attempts to the database are rejected with a corresponding error. Sessions that connected previously can still access the data until they disconnect.

To make the database lock also immediately eﬀective for already connected sessions, additionally issue the following SQL statement:

1. 1. ```
  CALL X100(TERMINATE); \g
```

Unlock the encrypted database:
1. 1. Connect to the locked database with the Terminal Monitor and option “-no_x100”:
```
sql -no_x100 <database_name>
```
  2. SQL to unlock the database:
```
ENABLE PASSPHRASE '<user supplied passphrase>'; \g
```

The connection with the “-no_x100” option connects without access to the warehouse data, but allows the administrative SQL statement to unlock the database.

Change the passphrase for the encrypted database:
1. 1. Connect to the unlocked database with the Terminal Monitor:
```
sql <database_name>
```
  2. SQL to change the passphrase:
```
ALTER PASSPHRASE '<old user supplied passphrase>' TO
'<new passphrase>'; \g
```

Again, it is important that the administrator remembers the new passphrase.

After changing the passphrase for an encrypted database, it is recommended to perform a new database backup (a.k.a. “database checkpoint”) to ensure continued full database recoverability.

When the database is no longer needed, destroy it:
1. 1. ```
  destroydb <database_name>
```

Note that the passphrase of the encrypted database is not needed to destroy it. The command can only be performed by users with the proper privileges, i.e. the database owner and administrators.

This first blog post in the database security series explained the concept of encryption at rest and how transparent encryption — in Actian Vector called Database Encryption — is used.

The next blog post in this series will take a look at function-based encryption in Actian Vector.

About Martin Fuerderer

Martin Fuerderer is a Principal Software Engineer for HCLSoftware, with 25+ years in database server development. His recent focus has been on security features within database environments, ensuring compliance and robust data protection. Martin has contributed to major product releases and frequently collaborates with peers to refine database security standards. On the Actian blog, Martin shares insights on secure database server development and best practices. Check his latest posts for guidance on safeguarding enterprise data.

Data Management

5 Reasons to Invest in a Next-Gen Data Catalog

Dee Radh

December 2, 2024

Organizations across every vertical face numerous challenges managing their data effectively and with full transparency. That’s at least partially due to data often being siloed across multiple systems or departments, making it difficult for employees to find, trust, and unlock the value of their company’s data assets.

Enter the Actian Data Intelligence Platform. This data intelligence solution is designed to address data issues by empowering everyone in an organization to easily find and trust the data they need to drive better decision-making, streamline operations, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards.

The platform serves as a centralized data catalog and an enterprise data marketplace. By improving data visibility, access, and governance, it provides a scalable and efficient framework for businesses to leverage their data assets. The powerful platform helps organizations explore new and sustainable use cases, including these five:

1. Overcome Data Silo and Complexity Challenges

Data professionals are well familiar with the struggles of working in environments where data is fragmented across departments and systems. This leads to data silos that restrict access to critical information, which ends up creating barriers to fully optimizing data.

Another downside to having barriers to data accessibility is that users spend significant time locating data instead of analyzing it, resulting in inefficiencies across business processes. The platform addresses accessibility issues by providing a centralized, searchable repository of all data assets.

The repository is enriched with metadata—such as data definitions, ownership, and quality metrics—that gives context and meaning to the organization’s data. Technical and non-technical users can quickly find and understand the data they need by searching for specific terms, filtering by criteria, or through personalized recommendations. This allows anyone who needs data to quickly and easily find what they need without requiring IT skills or relying on another team for assistance.

For example, marketing analysts looking for customer segmentation data for a new campaign can quickly locate relevant datasets in the Actian Data Intelligence Platform. Whether analysts know exactly what they’re searching for or are browsing through the data catalog, the platform provides insights into each dataset’s source, quality, and usage history.

Based on this information, analysts can decide whether to request access to the actual data or consult the data owner to fix any quality issues. This speeds up the data usage process and ensures that decision-makers have access to the best available data relevant for the campaign.

2. Solve the Issue of Limited Data Access for Business Users

In many organizations, data access is often limited to technical teams such as IT or data engineering. Being dependent on specialty or advanced skills creates bottlenecks because business users must request data from other teams. This reliance on IT or engineering departments leads to delayed insights and increases the workload on technical teams that may already be stretched thin.

Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps by democratizing data access by enabling non-technical users to explore and “shop” for data in a self-service environment. With Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s Enterprise Data Marketplace, business users can easily discover, request, and use data that has been curated and approved by data governance teams. This self-service model reduces the reliance on IT and data specialists, empowering all employees across the organization to make faster, data-driven decisions.

Barrier-free data access can help all users and departments. For instance, sales managers preparing for a strategy meeting can use the Enterprise Data Marketplace to access customer reports and visualizations—without needing to involve the data engineering team.

By using the platform, sales managers can pull data from various departments, such as finance, sales, or marketing, to create a comprehensive view of customer behavior. This allows the managers to identify opportunities for improved engagement as well as cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

3. Gain Visibility into Data Origins and Compliance Requirements

As organizations strive to meet stringent and regulatory requirements that seem to be constantly changing, having visibility into both data origins and data transformations becomes essential. Understanding how data has been sourced, modified, and managed is crucial for compliance and auditing processes. However, without proper tracking systems, tracing this information accurately can be extremely difficult.

This is another area where the platform can help. It provides detailed data lineage tracking, allowing users to trace the entire lifecycle of a dataset. From data’s origin to its transformation and usage, the platform offers a visual map of data flows, making it easier to troubleshoot errors, detect anomalies, and verify the accuracy of reports.

With this capability, organizations can present clear audit trails to demonstrate compliance with regulatory standards. A common use case is in the financial sector. A bank facing a regulatory audit can leverage the Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s data lineage feature to show auditors exactly how financial data has been handled.

By comprehensively tracing each dataset, the bank can easily demonstrate compliance with industry regulations. Plus, having visibility into data reduces the complexity of the audit process and builds trust in data management practices.

4. Provide Ongoing Data Governance

Managing data governance in compliance with internal policies and external regulations is another top priority for organizations. With laws such as GDPR and HIPAA that have strict penalties, companies must ensure that sensitive data is handled securely and data usage is properly tracked.

The platform delivers capabilities to meet this challenge head-on. It enables organizations to define and enforce governance rules across their data assets, ensuring that sensitive information is securely managed. Audit trail, access control, and data lineage features help organizations comply with regulatory requirements. These features also play a key role in ensuring data is properly cataloged and monitored.

Organizations in industries like healthcare that handle highly sensitive information can benefit from the platform. The platform can help companies, like those in healthcare, manage access controls, encryption, and data monitoring. This ensures compliance with HIPAA and other regulations while safeguarding patient privacy. Additionally, the platform streamlines internal governance practices, ensuring that all data users follow established guidelines for data security.

5. Build a Data-Driven Organization

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers a comprehensive solution to solve modern data management challenges. By improving data discovery, governance, and access, the platform removes barriers to data usage, making it easier for organizations to unlock the full value of their data assets.

Whether it’s giving business users self-service capabilities, streamlining compliance efforts, or supporting a data mesh approach that decentralizes data management, the platform gives individual departments the ability to manage their own data while maintaining organization-wide visibility. Additionally, the platform provides the tools and infrastructure needed to thrive in today’s data-driven world.

Experience a Live Demo

Organizations looking to improve their data outcomes should consider the Actian Data Intelligence Platform. By creating a single source of truth for data across the enterprise, the solution enables faster insights, smarter decisions, and stronger compliance—all key drivers of business success in the digital age. Find out more by joining a live product demo.

About Dee Radh

As Senior Director of Product Marketing, Dee Radh heads product marketing for Actian. Prior to that, she held senior PMM roles at Talend and Formstack. Dee has spent 100% of her career bringing technology products to market. Her expertise lies in developing strategic narratives and differentiated positioning for GTM effectiveness. In addition to a post-graduate diploma from the University of Toronto, Dee has obtained certifications from Pragmatic Institute, Product Marketing Alliance, and Reforge. Dee is based out of Toronto, Canada.

Databases

Actian Zen: The Market-Leading Embedded Database – Proven!

Phil Ostroff

November 13, 2024

actian zen, the market-leading embedded database

Get to Know Actian Zen

Actian Zen is a high-performance, embedded database management system designed for efficient data management in various applications, particularly IoT and edge computing. It offers several key features:

High Performance: Optimized for real-time data processing and quick response times.
Scalability: Can handle increasing data volumes and diverse endpoints.
Reliability: Ensures data integrity and availability even in challenging environments.
Security: Provides robust security features to protect sensitive data.
Flexibility: Supports NoSQL and SQL data access.
Easy Integration: Integrates with applications and devices using API.
Low Maintenance: Minimal administrative overhead.

With more than 13,000 customers, Actian Zen has been utilized around the world across multiple industries to capture data generated by mobile devices, IoT sensors, edge gateways and even complex machinery, giving its users a very high level of confidence in reporting performance at the edge.

Putting Zen Through its Paces: The TPCx-IoT Benchmark

Actian has enjoyed terrific success with its Zen customer base, and while in turn, its customers have greatly benefited from Zen’s strong performance. At the same time, Actian wanted to have a third-party review, comparison, and benchmark report on the performance of the product itself alongside similar market offerings in an unbiased fashion. In October 2024, Actian commissioned the McKnight Consulting Group to run a TCPx-IoT benchmark against two of its key competitors; MongoDB and MySQL.

TPCx-IoT is a benchmark developed by the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) to measure the performance, scalability, and price-performance of IoT (Internet of Things) data ingestion systems. It simulates real-time data ingestion and processing from IoT devices, evaluating a system’s ability to handle large volumes of time-series data efficiently.

Key features of the TPCx-IoT benchmark include:

Real-World Simulation: The benchmark simulates a realistic IoT scenario with a large
number of devices generating data.
Performance Metrics: It measures performance metrics like throughput (IoTps),
latency, and price-performance.
Vendor-Neutral: It provides a fair and objective comparison of different IoT data
management solutions.
Scalability Testing: It evaluates the system’s ability to handle increasing data volumes
and device counts.

By using the TPCx-IoT benchmark, organizations can compare the performance of different IoT data management solutions and select the best solution for their specific needs.

Discussion of Results: Actian Zen is a Powerful IoT Engine

The results of the benchmark test showed that Actian Zen was far superior to its key competitors in two important areas: throughput and latency.

Throughput: Actian Zen processes data significantly faster than other offerings, reaching up to 7,902 records per second compared to MongoDB’s at 2,099. MySQL lags far behind at 162 records per second. This means that Actian Zen has a throughput capability up to 50x the competition!
Latency: Actian Zen consistently demonstrates the lowest latency (time taken to process each record) across various sensor configurations, displaying up to 650x lower latency than the competition. MySQL exhibits the highest latency.

According to the McKnight Consulting Group, “In our evaluation of various embedded databases, Actian Zen emerged as a very compelling solution for enterprise-grade IoT workloads.”

Given the importance of real-time data availability at the edge, it is critical that both throughput and latency performance is as strong as they can be, especially given the myriad use cases that exist throughout various industries where having a true, confident view of current endpoint performance is critical, be it within healthcare, logistics, transportation, or another industry. This proves why so many customers, like Global Shop Solutions and Taifun Software AG have confidence in Actian Zen and why so many other organizations are taking a closer look…

Next Steps: Get the Report!

Curious about the benchmark? Want to know more? Here’s how to get started:

To read the full TPCx-IoT benchmark report from the McKnight Consulting Group, click here.
To find out more about Zen, check out our website here.

About Phil Ostroff

Phil Ostroff is Director of Competitive Intelligence at Actian, leveraging 30+ years of experience across automotive, healthcare, IT security, and more. Phil identifies market gaps to ensure Actian's data solutions meet real-world business demands, even in niche scenarios. He has led cross-industry initiatives that streamlined data strategies for diverse enterprises. Phil's Actian blog contributions offer insights into competitive trends, customer pain points, and product roadmaps. Check out his articles to stay informed on market dynamics.

Actian Life

Spooktacular Fun: Actian Halloween Celebration

Savannah Bruggeman

November 13, 2024

As the crisp autumn air settles in and leaves turn vibrant shades of orange and yellow, it’s that time of year again—Halloween! This year, Actian went all out to celebrate the spooky season with fun-filled Halloween activities, featuring a pumpkin carving contest, trick-or-treat bingo, and a costume contest!

Pumpkin Carving Contest

actian pumpkin carving

A highlight of our Halloween festivities was undoubtedly the pumpkin carving contest. On the morning of the event, the office was transformed into a pumpkin patch, with tables adorned with bright orange pumpkins, carving tools, and a variety of paints and decorations. The Actian teams got to work on creating their masterpieces.

The creativity displayed was remarkable, featuring everything from classic jack-o’-lanterns with cheerful grins to elaborate designs of cats, mushrooms, and eerie faces. Actian employees showcased their pumpkin artistry in the office gallery, where they could vote for their favorites. Colleagues wandered through the display, casting their votes, and Mollie Kendall emerged as the contest winner with her spooky jack-o’-lantern.

Costume Contest

actian third place costume winner as a mushroom

What office Halloween party would be complete without a costume contest? Actian employees showcased their creativity and Halloween spirit in full force! Costumes included everything from clever pop culture references to DIY masterpieces.

The competition was intense, but in the end, the winners earned well-deserved prizes and bragging rights for the year. This event successfully brought the team together, fostering laughter and celebrating the season through friendly rivalry.

First Place: Karl Schimmel, Actian customer engineer, stole the show with his hilarious Andy Reid costume, which would have made Mahomes proud.

Second Place: La’Quinn Drick Hunter wowed everyone with his impressive Luigi costume, despite not having a Mario to accompany him.

Third Place: Kasey Nolan showcased her creativity with a unique mushroom costume that secured her third place.

With such a variety of innovative costumes, the team is already looking forward to next year’s contest!

A Celebration of Team Spirit

Beyond the contests, the Halloween celebration was a fantastic opportunity for Actian teams to take a break from a very productive year. The atmosphere was filled with joy, and it was heartwarming to see everyone come together to celebrate not just Halloween, but the vibrant culture of Actian, both in person and online.

As the day drew to a close, it was clear that this Halloween celebration was more than just a fun escape from work—it was a reminder of the creativity, teamwork, and community spirit that make our company a great place to be. With smiles, full bellies from treats, and a collection of hilarious memories, we’re already looking forward to next year’s celebration!

As we move into the final mile of the year and start to ramp up on holiday planning, we hope you enjoyed a peek into the Actian culture we are so proud of and invite you to share your own Halloween fun!

About Savannah Bruggeman

Savannah Bruggeman is a Marketing Operations Specialist at Actian, bringing a data-driven mindset to campaign optimization. A recent Loyola University Chicago graduate, Savannah has quickly integrated fresh ideas into Actian's marketing processes. She specializes in marketing tech, analytics, and streamlining lead generation workflows. Her blog contributions cover marketing automation, lead management, and performance tracking. Explore her articles for actionable insights on driving marketing ROI.

Databases

Experience Near-Unlimited Storage Capacity With HCL Informix® 15

Emily Taylor

November 12, 2024

We are thrilled to unveil HCL Informix® 15, re-imagined for organizations looking for the best way to modernize out-of-support IBM® Informix® applications. Our customers love HCL Informix because it is fast, reliable, and scalable. With the release of HCL Informix 15, we build upon this proud heritage with:

HCL Informix 4GL, a fourth-generation business application development environment that is designed to simplify the building of data-centric business applications, now available from Actian.
Larger row and page addresses that enhance scalability for large-scale data storage and processing. The new maximum capacity for a single instance is four times the estimated size of the internet.
External smartblobs enables the storage of binary large objects like static documents, videos and photos in an external file system to facilitate faster archiving.
Invisible indexes help developers and DBAs fine-tune queries by identifying which indexes are critical to specific queries by flexibly omitting them to see if they impact query runtime.

These capabilities fortify HCL Informix’s already solid foundation to underpin the next generation of mission-critical applications. They reflect our vision for a more powerful offering that guarantees seamless business continuity and secures the longevity of your organization’s existing applications.

HCL Informix 15 now includes cloud-enabled product capabilities including a Kubernetes containerization deployment option and updated REST APIs (previously only available in HCL OneDB). For customers using HCL OneDB 1.0 and 2.0, we will adhere to the announced lifecycle dates and work with you on a recommended in-place upgrade to HCL Informix.

HCL Informix customers like Equifax are looking forward to taking advantage of these new capabilities to improve their business use cases in the near future.

“HCL Informix 15 will empower Equifax to quickly process a steady stream of payments, claims decisions, tax verifications, and more, enabling us to make data-driven decisions,” said Nick Fuller, Associate Vice President of Technology at Equifax. “Its capacity to handle vast amounts of data gives us confidence in its ability to meet our demand for rapid and efficient processing.”

Watch the Webinar >

HCL Informix: Building an Advanced Database for Modern Enterprise Applications

4GL: Easily maintain and recompile existing 4GL applications

hcl-informix-4gl

While many IBM Informix customers are familiar with 4GL, Actian is now offering HCL Informix 4GL and HCL Informix SQL for the first time. HCL Informix customers can leverage 4GL and ISQL to develop and debug applications, including building new menus, forms, screens, and reports with ease. 4GL reduces the time it takes to build and maintain HCL Informix applications and perform database operations like querying, updating, and managing data. Informix 4GL has a powerful report writer that enables the creation of complex reports. This capability is particularly useful for generating business reports from data stored in HCL Informix.

HCL Informix 4GL accelerates the building of applications such as:

Accounting Systems: Track money owed by and to the business, including invoicing, payment processing, and reports.
Inventory Management Systems: Manage storage locations, stock movements, and inventory audits.
Human Resources Systems: Maintain detailed records of employee information, performance, and benefits.

HCL Informix 15 Server Re-Architected for Massive Storage Capacity Improvement

Larger Row and Page Addresses: Manage Large Data Sets Without Compression

Have peace of mind knowing that data volume limitations are an issue of the past with HCL Informix 15. That means improved reliability and better use of resources because organizations won’t need to compress or fragment tables.

When Informix Turbo launched in 1989, Informix architects believed 4 bytes would more than suffice for uniquely addressing each row so each page could hold a max of 255 rows and each table could have a maximum of 16.7 million pages. Now, some of the largest HCL Informix customers are pushing those original limits to their edge. While it is possible to fragment tables to get around the max page limit, that’s an imperfect solution at scale. So we’ve expanded storage limits dramatically so max storage capacity is half a yottabyte, four times the estimated size of the internet.

large-data-sets-hcl-informix

External Smartblobs: Store Large Objects With Ease

external-smartblobs
Large objects like video or audio have traditionally been difficult for transactional databases like HCL Informix to manage because they need to be compressed to store the object efficiently, which takes time.

With HCL Informix 15, external Smartblobs enable developers to store the objects in a file system, while only keeping a record of the metadata. Instead of compressing the data, users can now create a special smartblob space to store the file metadata, with the object files stored externally.

External Smartblobs delivers benefits across a variety of use cases including:

Quality Assurance: Analyze how well a real-time monitoring system built on HCL Informix detects faulty products on an assembly line. Auditors can identify the product that was discarded in the metadata to find the image files of the faulty product without impacting the underlying application.
Tax Authority: Tax administrators need to capture tax returns in case they need to audit a company or individual. They can store the static tax return documents with a specific ID and access them through the HCL Informix application just by using the metadata.

Invisible Indexes: Optimize Your Queries Faster

Indexes are special data structures that improve the speed of data retrieval operations on a database table. They work similarly to an index in a book, allowing the database to find and access the data faster without having to scan every row in a table. However, not every index will be used for the queries in an application. HCL Informix 15 enables users to make certain indexes invisible when running an application to help test which indexes impact queries and which ones do not for better operational efficiency.

Invisible indexes support real-world use cases such as:

E-commerce Platforms often deal with large volumes of transactions and queries. Invisible indexes can be used to test and optimize query performance without disrupting the shopping experience.
Healthcare System databases require efficient data retrieval for patient records and research. Invisible indexes can help optimize these queries without affecting the overall system.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems handle vast amounts of customer data. Invisible indexes can be used to improve the performance of specific queries related to customer interactions and their history.

Start Your Modernization Project With HCL Informix 15

The Actian team is ready to support you as you get started on your modernization project with HCL Informix 15.

Check out the on-demand webinar “Secure Your Future with HCL Informix® 15” to learn more about HCL Informix 15. Also, see how your peers are using HCL Informix to modernize their applications. Plus, wait until the end to hear about our limited one-time offer.

Watch the Webinar >

Additional Resources:

Informix is a trademark of IBM Corporation in at least one jurisdiction and is used under license.

About Emily Taylor

Emily Taylor is a product manager at Actian (HCL Informix), specializing in cloud-native and hybrid solutions. With 15+ years in SaaS product growth, she has led teams through the full product lifecycle, from ideation to market launch, especially for data & analytics in retail. Emily has contributed to product roadmaps for machine learning-driven insights and optimization. She regularly hosts webinars on bridging cloud services and on-prem data. Her articles on the Actian blog dive into Informix updates, pricing optimization, and supply chain data analytics. Check out her recent posts for best practices on modernizing data workflows.

Data Platform

The Game-Changing Data Intelligence Platform for Data Democratization

Dee Radh

November 11, 2024

In today’s ever-changing data landscape, managing, discovering, and utilizing all relevant data effectively is a critical challenge for organizations, regardless of their industry. As both data volumes and the number of sources grow, so does the complexity of organizing and accessing that information, especially when it resides across disparate systems and platforms.

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform is designed to address these challenges head-on. It enables both technical and non-technical users to quickly and efficiently find, access, and trust enterprise data, regardless of where it’s stored.

What Sets the Actian Platform Apart for Data Democratization?

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform is a comprehensive metadata management solution that streamlines data governance, simplifies data discovery, and manages vast data assets. It’s built with flexibility and ease-of-use at its core, catering to both data professionals and everyday data users who don’t have advanced IT skill sets.

One benefit that sets the Actian platform apart is its ability to automate processes, ensuring that organizations can keep pace with their rapidly evolving data environment without extensive manual effort. The platform is powered by two essential applications:

Studio. This application is geared toward data professionals, including chief data officers (CDOs), data engineers, data stewards, and data governance teams. It is designed to make data documentation easy and automated, allowing teams to enrich and manage their data with precision. Users can curate data assets, ensuring they are well-organized and readily accessible.

For organizations struggling with the complexity of metadata management, Studio simplifies the process by automating the collection and curation of data, reducing manual overhead and increasing accuracy. Data stewards, in particular, can use the platform to ensure that their organization’s data is both trustworthy and compliant with internal and external regulations.

Explorer. This application is designed for everyday users, making data exploration and discovery simple and intuitive. Whether users are data scientists, analysts, or business stakeholders, the platform allows them to find relevant data quickly and easily. Its interface is user-friendly, ensuring that even those without a deep technical background can access the data they need to make informed decisions.

The self-service nature of Explorer is one of its standout features. It allows business leaders and data teams to access data when they need it, streamlining workflows and accelerating decision-making across departments.

4 Key Differentiators Empower Data-Driven Organizations

Four primary features distinguish the Actian Data Intelligence Platform from other data management solutions, making it a top choice for modern organizations:

API-Based Automation. The solution is a fully API-driven platform, which means that organizations can automate their entire data cataloging process. This level of automation reduces the need for manual updates and ensures that the data catalog stays up-to-date as the data environment evolves. This automation also helps scale metadata management across complex environments with ease.
Universal Connectivity. Actian Data Intelligence Platform supports a wide range of data sources, from traditional databases to cloud services. This universal connectivity makes it an incredibly versatile tool, capable of managing diverse data types across multiple platforms. Organizations with hybrid data environments can also rely on the Actian Data Intelligence Platform to seamlessly discover and manage all their data assets in one place.
Powerful Knowledge Graph. A comprehensive knowledge graph enables a progressive design for data discovery. As data needs grow, the knowledge graph adapts, helping uncover relationships between data points, enriching the overall understanding of data assets. This dynamic feature provides deeper insights and allows organizations to maximize the value of their data.
Intuitive User Experience. The platform is designed with simplicity in mind. It requires no training to use, making it accessible for users of all levels. Whether users are experienced data professionals or business analysts, it offers an experience that is both intuitive and powerful, allowing for quick adoption and effective use across the organization.

Modern Capabilities to Advance Data Discovery

A data discovery platform like the Actian solution is essential for unifying, governing, and leveraging data effectively. In addition to meeting organizations’ needs for data intelligence, the Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers a variety of innovative capabilities that ensure data is connected, compliant, and easily accessible:

Business Glossary. Actian’s Business Glossary allows organizations to establish a consistent business language across all data consumers. This feature is crucial for ensuring that everyone in the organization is working from the same definitions and standards, fostering collaboration and transparency. Teams can easily define rules, set policies, and visualize relationships between business terms through an intuitive, automated interface.
Data Compliance. In an era of increased regulation, data compliance is critical. Actian helps organizations stay compliant with regulations by detecting personal information and providing suggestions on how to tag and manage sensitive data. This capability allows data stewards to handle compliance issues with greater autonomy, ensuring that data usage across the organization adheres to legal requirements.
Data Discovery. The Actian platform takes inspiration from marketplaces and e-commerce websites, offering smart search capabilities that allow users to find the data they need quickly and efficiently. Whether users know exactly what they are looking for or are exploring potential use cases, the platform’s data discovery capabilities provide smart recommendations and a 360-degree view of relevant data.
Data Governance. The platform’s data governance capabilities help drive business initiatives by ensuring that data is trusted, secure, and compliant. Actian’s approach to governance is collaborative and non-intrusive, adapting to the specific needs of each organization and ensuring that data governance evolves with the organization’s data landscape.
Data Lineage. Actian provides comprehensive data lineage capabilities, allowing data teams to map the entire lifecycle of data, from collection to storage and use. This context-rich view helps organizations understand their data’s origins, relationships, and evolution over time, which is critical for regulatory compliance and improved analytics.
Data Quality. Through its ability to connect with data quality management (DQM) solutions, the Actian platform provides users with data quality metrics during the discovery phase. This ensures that teams can trust the data they are working with, avoiding risks and driving better outcomes.
Data Shopping. Similar to an online shopping experience, Actian’s Enterprise Data Marketplace allows users to browse, request, and gain access to relevant datasets with ease. This intuitive data shopping experience democratizes data access across the organization, empowering users to leverage data for strategic decision-making without needing to be data experts.
Data Stewardship. The Actian platform helps data stewards manage large volumes of data by automating data documentation and enhancing metadata management. Data stewardship reduces the burden on data teams, increases productivity, and ensures that organizations can maintain high data standards without the need for extensive manual input.

Make Data Usable and Accessible to Everyone

At its core, Actian is a smart data intelligence platform that enables organizations to find, trust, and unlock the value of their enterprise data. By offering both technical and non-technical users the tools they need to access and understand their data, the platform empowers informed decision-making, drives productivity, and fosters collaboration.

With capabilities such as Studio and Explorer, organizations can maximize the value of their data while maintaining governance and compliance. Whether it’s enriching data, ensuring regulatory compliance, or democratizing access to data across the enterprise, the platform provides a scalable, flexible solution that adapts to the evolving needs of today’s data-driven businesses. Experience it for yourself with a live tour.

About Dee Radh

Data Management

Why a Data Intelligence Platform is Business Critical

Dee Radh

November 8, 2024

why a data intelligence platform is business critical

In today’s digital age, data has become the new currency. It powers decisions, strategies, and operations across industries. However, managing data effectively is far from simple. The complexity of modern data environments is a significant roadblock to driving tangible business outcomes, despite the substantial investments made in data and analytics.

The Disconnect Between Data and Business Outcomes

Many organizations invest heavily in data technologies, expecting this will lead to improved business performance. Yet a common challenge persists: Despite all the data at their disposal, companies are still struggling to convert that data into meaningful, high-value outcomes. This disconnect stems from the overwhelming complexities of data, particularly as organizations attempt to scale their data initiatives.

Scaling brings new hurdles. Companies relying on legacy systems or outdated methodologies often find themselves bogged down by complex data architectures and cumbersome workflows. As the volume of data grows, so do the complexities of managing, governing, and leveraging it effectively. Manual processes and legacy tools simply cannot keep pace with the demand for real-time insights and actionable information.

In addition, many organizations fail to modernize their approach to data and analytics governance, which is crucial for a successful digital transformation and fully optimizing data. Without proper governance, data becomes fragmented, difficult to access, and ultimately less valuable to the business. These issues lead to costly projects that either fail outright or deliver a low return on investment (ROI), causing businesses to miss critical opportunities.

Benefit From the Exponential Growth of Data

One of the most pressing challenges organizations face today is the exponential growth of data, coming from more sources than ever. Data flows from countless sources, including:

Internal systems
Cloud services
Customer interactions
IoT devices
Social media
Other sources

This data influx places immense pressure on traditional tools and methods, which are proving to be insufficient in managing, governing, and securing vast amounts of data. As data grows in volume and variety, so does the need for automation. That’s because manual processes can no longer handle the scale required to keep data accurate, secure, and accessible. Information gaps arise, and organizations miss out on valuable insights that could drive competitive advantage.

This places a growing need for a data intelligence solution. Additionally, there is increased awareness that without a streamlined, automated approach to data intelligence, organizations won’t be able to effectively manage their expanding data landscape.

The Three Critical Questions of Data Management

At the heart of data management challenges are three critical questions that every organization must address to optimize the full potential of their data:

Where is my data? Data is often scattered across multiple systems, departments, and geographic regions. Without a unified view, it’s nearly impossible to leverage data effectively. Siloed data environments hinder innovation and slow down decision-making processes.
Can I trust my data? Data quality remains a major issue for many organizations. In fact, many companies don’t measure the financial cost of poor data quality, which makes it difficult to determine how inadequate data is impacting the business. When data is inaccurate or incomplete, it undermines decision making and leads to inefficiencies. Trustworthy data is ultimately the foundation of trustworthy business decisions.
Can I easily access the data? At many companies, access to data is often restricted due to compliance rules, security measures, or siloed systems. This lack of access prevents teams from fully leveraging the data needed to innovate and respond to market changes quickly. Data should be readily available to every person and application that needs it.

Key Capabilities of a Modern Data Intelligence Platform

Addressing data challenges requires a comprehensive solution that centralizes, verifies, and governs data efficiently. This is where a data intelligence platform that democratizes data across the organization becomes essential.

A data intelligence platform provides a unified approach to managing, governing, and leveraging data, regardless of where it’s stored. It aligns data practices with business objectives, ensuring that data is accurate, secure, and accessible when needed. It addresses the key aspects of data management:

Data Integration. Connecting data from various sources into a single, unified view is mandatory for making informed decisions. A data intelligence platform integrates data seamlessly, providing a holistic view of all data assets across the organization.
Data Quality. Maintaining data accuracy, consistency, and reliability is critical to ensuring trustworthy insights. A data intelligence platform automates data quality processes, including cleansing, monitoring, and enrichment, to ensure that data remains useful and accurate.
Data Governance. Effective data governance is crucial for managing data security, privacy, and compliance. A data intelligence platform helps establish and enforce data governance policies, ensuring that data is used appropriately and remains protected.
Analytics and Insights. A data intelligence platform enables analytics and machine learning capabilities, empowering organizations to extract valuable insights from their data. This allows for predictive and prescriptive decision making, helping businesses stay ahead of the competition.
Data Cataloging. Metadata management is a key component of any data intelligence platform. By cataloging data assets, a platform makes it easier for users to discover, understand, and access the data they need, even without deep technical expertise.
Self-Service Capabilities. Data professionals, business users, and decision makers need the ability to access and analyze data without relying on IT teams or advanced skill sets. A data intelligence platform empowers users with self-service tools, making it easier to derive insights and act on them quickly.

The Business Impact of Data Intelligence

Implementing a data intelligence platform has a direct impact on operational efficiency and business outcomes. When employees spend less time searching for and cleaning data, they can focus on using that data to drive innovation and deliver value. This operational efficiency translates directly into revenue potential.

Likewise, trust in data also leads to confidence in the decisions derived from it. With trustworthy data, organizations can move faster, capitalize on market opportunities, and make strategic pivots when necessary.

Data governance, a core component of data intelligence, also ensures compliance with privacy and security regulations, protecting sensitive data and minimizing risk. In addition, good data leads to better business outcomes. Accurate forecasts, informed decisions, and faster responses to changing market conditions all stem from having the right data at the right time.

Solving Complexity With the Right Data Intelligence Platform

Managing data in today’s digital landscape is complex, but with the right tools, organizations can overcome the challenges of scale, governance, and data quality. A data intelligence platform, like the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, provides a comprehensive solution for integrating, managing, and leveraging data across the enterprise.

By addressing the critical questions of data management—where is data, can it be trusted, and can it be easily accessed—a data intelligence platform unlocks the full potential of an organization’s data. This allows businesses to drive operational efficiency, improve decision making, and deliver better business outcomes.

In a world where data is the new currency, investing in a data intelligence platform is business critical. To find out more, take a Live Product Tour

About Dee Radh

Actian Life

Why Partner With Actian: A Strategic Alliance for Success

Ashley Knoble

November 6, 2024

Now more than ever, data management, integration, and analytics are crucial components of business success for data-driven organizations. Companies seeking to innovate, scale, and make decisions with confidence need trusted vendors that can provide modern, comprehensive, and easy-to-use technologies that solve business challenges and generate new value from data.

This is where Actian’s partner program stands out. It offers opportunities for you to complement your solutions with Actian products and services to meet customers’ current and future data needs. No single vendor can meet the diverse and complex data needs of today’s businesses, making strategic alliances essential to provide robust and tailored solutions to customers.

Partner With Actian and Expand Your Reach

Partnering with a technology leader like Actian is not just a strategic move—it is essential when you want to stay competitive, reach new customers, and continue adding value for current customers. Collaborating with Actian can support innovation, streamline operations, and provide access to innovative technologies that strengthen customers’ tech stacks and offer a connected ecosystem.

The Actian partner program is designed to optimize the strengths of our modern and expanding product portfolio by integrating our offerings with your technologies and services. By forming strategic partnerships with Actian, you can unlock the full potential of your data products and services while benefiting from a robust network of technologies, expert services, and solution partners.

Actian’s Unique Partner Value Proposition

As a forward-thinking data technology company, Actian offers a modern data management and data intelligence portfolio that enables customers to easily connect, govern, and analyze their data. Our solutions enable businesses to seamlessly manage data across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments—and have confidence in their decision-making.

More than 42 million users around the world use our products, with over 20,000 businesses trusting our scalable technologies. When you partner with Actian, you gain several distinct advantages:

Comprehensive Training and Support. Actian invests heavily in its partners, which is why coming soon, we’ll offer training and certification courses that ensure you are equipped to deliver the best possible solutions to customers. This investment in skills development translates into greater customer satisfaction and higher success rates for joint projects.
Flexible Go-to-Market (GTM) Models. You can leverage a variety of GTM strategies through a partnership with Actian. Whether through co-branding, co-participation at events, or access to marketing development funds, Actian ensures that its partners are positioned for success.
Competitive Compensation. With margin-sharing models and generous incentives, you can benefit from substantial financial benefits. These incentives are designed to promote long-term, mutually beneficial relationships, rather than focusing on short-term gains.

4 Types of Partnerships Supported by Actian

Actian’s flexibility extends to the types of partnerships it supports, ensuring that vendors with various solutions can benefit from the partner program:

Cloud Providers. Cloud adoption continues to accelerate, with companies looking for efficient ways to migrate to and manage their data in the cloud. Actian’s rapid onboarding process and hybrid capabilities make it easy for cloud providers to offer comprehensive data management solutions to customers.
Systems Integrators. Systems integrators can enhance their service offerings by implementing Actian’s database and data management technologies into their client projects. This drives revenue while also boosting customer satisfaction by delivering purpose-built solutions that address specific business challenges.
ISVs/OEMs. Independent software vendors (ISVs) and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) can embed Actian technologies into their products, offering differentiating features such as advanced data integration and analytics capabilities. This allows these businesses to stand out in their respective markets while benefiting from Actian’s extensive technologies and support.
Technology Alliances. Actian partners with other technology leaders to deliver powerful joint solutions. By embedding Actian’s data management and analytics tools into their own technologies, tech partners can provide enhanced value to customers and gain a competitive edge.

Why You Should Partner With Actian

Partnering with Actian allows you to leverage a proven data portfolio that accelerates transformation and modernization, enabling customers to make confident, data-driven decisions that grow their business. Core reasons to partner with Actian include:

Access to Cutting-Edge Technology. Actian’s portfolio is designed to integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructures, providing businesses with scalable, reliable, and high-performance data solutions. This enables both partners and customers to stay ahead of the curve in terms of innovation and technological advancement.
Mutual Success Focus. Actian’s partnership philosophy is centered on long-term relationships rather than transactional engagements. We work closely with partners, aligning goals and objectives to ensure mutual success. This commitment to collaboration helps you exceed customer expectations, delivering projects that consistently outperform competitors.
Global Reach and Expertise. Actian’s global presence, extensive customer base, and experience working with leading companies position you for success in any market. Our deep expertise—spanning more than 50 years—in data management allows you to offer industry-leading solutions to a wide range of industries and geographies.

Partner With Actian to Unlock New Opportunities

Joining Actian’s partner program is an opportunity to grow your business, enhance your technology stack offerings, and deliver value-driven solutions to customers. Our combination of industry-leading products, expert support, and a collaborative partnership model ensures that your company is well equipped to tackle the challenges your customers face with modern data management.

Whether you are a cloud provider, systems integrator, ISV, OEM, or looking to form a technology alliance, partnering with Actian will empower your business to scale and innovate. Our commitment to partners, supported by comprehensive partner benefits, makes Actian an ideal choice for vendors like yours that are seeking to advance their data capabilities offerings.

Actian’s track record of success, commitment to its partners, and industry-leading solutions make it a standout partner in today’s data-driven world. Explore the opportunities that come with joining the Actian partner program and unlock new pathways to success. Get signed up today!

About Ashley Knoble

Ashley Knoble is Director of Strategic Alliances for Actian's East and Canadian regions, bringing 10+ years of expertise in business development and partner management. Ashley has excelled at SaaS solution growth, cyber security engagements, and partner ecosystems. She has a reputation for forging strong relationships that drive competitive growth. A frequent speaker at regional tech forums, Ashley also contributes to partner strategy Whitepapers. In her blog contributions, Ashley shares best practices for alliances in data management, network connectivity, and modern technologies. Check out her articles to learn how to cultivate strategic partnerships.

Data Governance

Importance of Data Governance in IoT

Kunal Shah

October 31, 2024

The Internet of Things (IoT) is reshaping industries by connecting physical devices to the digital realm. As IoT devices proliferate, they generate vast amounts of data, offering unprecedented insights into operations, customer behavior, and market trends.

According to IoT Analytics, there were 16.6 billion connected IoT devices by the end of 2023 (a growth of 15% over 2022). IoT Analytics expects this to grow 13% to 18.8 billion by the end of 2024.

To fully harness the potential of this data deluge, a robust data governance framework is essential.

Why Data Governance Matters in IoT

Data governance is the practice of managing the availability, usability, integrity, and security of an organization’s data assets. In the context of IoT, it ensures that data is collected, stored, processed, and analyzed in a consistent, reliable, and compliant manner. Here are some key reasons why data governance is crucial for IoT success:

Regulatory Compliance: IoT devices often collect and process sensitive personal data, necessitating adherence to stringent regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. Data governance ensures that organizations can demonstrate compliance and avoid hefty fines.
Data Quality: IoT devices can generate inaccurate or incomplete data due to various factors, such as sensor malfunctions or network connectivity issues. Data governance helps identify and rectify data quality issues, ensuring that decisions are based on reliable information.
Data Security: IoT devices are potential targets for cyberattacks, making data security a paramount concern. Data governance establishes policies and procedures to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access, breaches, and data loss.
Data Privacy: IoT devices often collect personal data, raising privacy concerns. Data governance helps organizations implement measures to protect individuals’ privacy rights and comply with data privacy regulations.
Data Accessibility: A well-governed data environment empowers users to access and analyze data, regardless of their technical expertise. Data governance fosters data literacy and enables data-driven decision-making across the organization.

Key Capabilities of a Data Governance Framework

A comprehensive data governance framework incorporates various capabilities to ensure data quality, security, and compliance. Let’s delve into some of the critical capabilities:

Data Catalog: A data catalog provides a centralized repository of information about data assets, including their definitions, metadata, and relationships. It enables users to discover and understand data, accelerating data analysis and insights.
Business Glossary: A business glossary defines common business terms and their meanings, ensuring consistent understanding across the organization. It helps bridge the gap between technical and business users, facilitating effective communication and collaboration.
Data Lineage: Data lineage traces the journey of data from its source to its destination, revealing how data is transformed and used. It helps identify data dependencies, assess impact, and troubleshoot data quality issues.
Data Discovery: Data discovery tools enable users to search, explore, and visualize data. They help users find relevant data, understand its context, and gain insights without requiring deep technical skills.
Data Quality: Data quality management ensures that data is accurate, complete, consistent, timely, and relevant. It involves monitoring data quality metrics, implementing data cleansing and validation processes, and establishing data quality standards.

Democratizing Data Access Through Data Governance

Data governance plays a crucial role in democratizing data access, making data-driven insights available to a wider audience within the organization. By establishing clear data standards, providing user-friendly tools, and fostering a data-driven culture, organizations can empower employees to make informed decisions.

Benefits of Democratizing Data Access:

Enhanced Decision-Making: Data-driven insights enable better decision-making at all levels of the organization.
Increased Innovation: Access to data fosters creativity and innovation, leading to new products and services.
Improved Operational Efficiency: Data-driven insights can streamline processes and reduce costs.
Enhanced Customer Experience: Data-driven personalization and customer insights improve customer satisfaction.

Data governance is no longer an option but a necessity for IoT success. By implementing a robust data governance framework, organizations can unlock the full potential of their IoT data, ensuring regulatory compliance, data quality, security, and accessibility. By democratizing data access, organizations can empower their workforce, drive innovation, and achieve sustainable growth.

Our recent acquisition enables us to offer our customers a unified data intelligence and governance solution to seamlessly discover, govern, and maximize the value of their data assets.

The platform is a cloud-native Data Intelligence Platform with universal connectivity that supports metadata management applications from search and exploration to data catalog, lineage, governance, compliance and enterprise data marketplace. Powered by an adaptive knowledge graph, the Actian Data Intelligence Platform enables organizations to democratize data access and generate a 360-degree view of their assets, including the relationships between them.

Discover the platform by signing up for a demo.

About Kunal Shah

Kunal Shah is a product marketer with 15+ years in data and digital growth, leading marketing for Actian Zen Edge and NoSQL products. He has consulted on data modernization for global enterprises, drawing on past roles at SAS. Kunal holds an MBA from Duke University. Kunal regularly shares market insights at data and tech conferences, focusing on embedded database innovations. On the Actian blog, Kunal covers product growth strategy, go-to-market motions, and real-world commercial execution. Explore his latest posts to discover how edge data solutions can transform your business.

Data Management

Flip the Script on Data Management With a Next-Gen Data Catalog

Phil Ostroff

October 29, 2024

As you’re probably experiencing firsthand, businesses are generating and handling more data than ever before, creating an urgent need for sophisticated tools to manage it all. Traditional data catalogs, while once effective, often fall short in providing the agility and accessibility needed by modern organizations. Managing, organizing, and making sense of your data requires easy-to-use tools that go beyond yesterday’s metadata management solutions to provide the speed, functionality, and features your business needs.

Enter next-generation data catalogs—innovative solutions that are designed to transform the way you discover, govern, and leverage your data. These cutting-edge data catalogs offer intuitive interfaces, advanced automation, and robust governance features that empower all users, making them essential for any company striving to harness the full power of its data assets.

As you focus on making data more accessible and actionable, next-generation data catalogs can help. They have emerged as a critical component in the modern data landscape.

How Next-Generation Data Catalogs Differ From Traditional Solutions

Traditional data catalogs have served businesses well for years, providing a repository to store and manage metadata and helping organizations locate critical data assets. However, these catalogs are often bulky, slow, and expensive, creating barriers to broader adoption, especially by non-technical users.

In addition, legacy data catalogs typically come with hefty license fees and require significant manual effort to classify and manage data. In contrast, next-generation data catalogs provide faster, more cost-effective, and user-friendly solutions designed to meet the needs of modern businesses. Next-gen data catalogs offer:

Cloud-Native Architecture. Traditional data catalogs are often tied to on-premises systems, which can limit scalability and accessibility. Modern catalogs are built natively for the cloud, offering a flexible, scalable architecture that grows with your business.

The architecture allows you to integrate a wide range of cloud platforms, applications, and on-premises systems seamlessly for a connected ecosystem. A cloud-native architecture also makes it easier to manage data in hybrid or multi-cloud environments, ensuring the catalog can adapt as your infrastructure evolves.

Ease of Use. One key differentiator of next-generation data catalogs is their focus on ease of use. Traditional solutions often require specialized skills to navigate, limiting their usability to data professionals and technical users. Next-gen catalogs, on the other hand, are designed with the non-technical user in mind.

These modern catalogs feature intuitive user interfaces and automated workflows that simplify the process of finding, accessing, and utilizing data, making them accessible to a broader range of users within your organization. Whether it’s through natural language search or user-friendly data lineage displays, these catalogs empower you to work with data without requiring deep technical expertise. Ultimately, this helps democratize the data flow process.

Enhanced Data Governance and Compliance. While traditional catalogs have long supported data governance, next-generation catalogs take it a step further by automating much of the data governance process. These solutions offer role-based access controls, automatic metadata tagging, and support for business glossaries, making it easier to manage sensitive information and ensure compliance with regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

Some next-gen catalogs even incorporate advanced capabilities to automatically detect and classify sensitive data. They can then provide real-time alerts and insights to prevent data breaches.

Cost-Effective Solutions. The pricing model of traditional data catalogs has been a significant barrier for many organizations, with enterprise licenses costing upwards of $150,000 annually, according to a report from Eckerson Group “Next-Generation Data Catalogs.” In contrast, modern catalogs offer competitive pricing models, often at a fraction of the cost.

For example, the report notes that the annual cost for next-gen data catalogs typically ranges from $70,000 to $90,000. Lower costs, combined with new features and reduced manual effort, make these catalogs an attractive option for businesses of all sizes.

5 Ways the Actian Data Intelligence Platform Stands Out for Its Next-Generation Data Catalog

Among the modern data catalogs on the market, the Actian Data Intelligence Platform stands out as a modern solution for modernizing your data management practices. It offers an ideal platform and data catalog for data-driven organizations like yours to democratize data, centralize and unify all enterprise metadata, and offer a single source of truth.

Five key reasons to use the Actian Data Intelligence Platform include:

A Focus on Simplicity and User Experiences. Actian Data Intelligence Platform is focused on delivering simplicity—and this is reflected in the platform’s clean and intuitive user interface. The platform offers two user interfaces: Actian Explorer for business users who need to discover and explore data, and Actian Studio for data stewards responsible for managing and governing data assets. This separation of interfaces ensures that both technical and non-technical users can interact with the data catalog in ways that are most relevant to their roles.

Enterprise Data Marketplace Integration. What sets Actian apart from many of its competitors is its Enterprise Data Marketplace. This feature allows business domains within your organization to share data products seamlessly, enabling greater collaboration and data democratization across departments. When users look to access a data product, the platform routes those requests through third-party workflow systems, like those from Jira or ServiceNow, to ensure governance policies are followed while maintaining ease of use.

Advanced Metadata Management and Federation. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform is built on a knowledge graph that supports multiple metamodels, allowing each business domain to create its own data catalog tailored to its specific needs. These domain-specific catalogs can then be combined into an enterprise catalog, providing a holistic view of your data landscape. This flexibility is crucial when operating across multiple business units or geographies because it allows you to maintain a unified data catalog while accommodating the unique requirements of each domain.

Seamless Integration and Interoperability. With more than 70 proprietary data connectors, the Actian solution integrates with a wide range of data platforms, cloud applications, and on-premises systems. This ensures that the catalog can pull metadata from virtually any source within your organization, providing a comprehensive view of your data ecosystem. Additionally, by integrating with third-party applications such as Monte Carlo and Soda, you benefit from data quality monitoring to maintain high levels of data accuracy and reliability.

Future-Ready Without the Hype. While many next-gen data catalogs are rushing to integrate AI features, Actian takes a measured approach, only adopting new technologies that have proven value to customers. For example, the Actian platform uses GenAI to summarize long descriptions and improve usability in targeted areas. This approach ensures that the platform remains cutting-edge without overwhelming users with unproven features.

A Strategic Investment in Data-Driven Success

As you continue to navigate the complexities of the digital age, the need for robust, scalable, and user-friendly data management solutions is more critical than ever. Next-generation data catalogs, like the one from the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, offer a powerful alternative to traditional solutions, providing enhanced usability, governance, and cost-efficiency.

Investing in a next-generation data catalog is not just a smart choice—it’s a strategic imperative. Actian Data Intelligence Platform, with its focus on simplicity, integration, and innovation, is well-positioned to help you gain maximum value from your data and drive meaningful business outcomes.

“The Actian Data Intelligence Platform is more than just a data catalog: it bundles at no cost a data marketplace for publishing and consuming data products, putting Actian on the cutting-edge of all data catalogs,” according to the Eckerson Group.

Experience the platform for yourself with an Actian product tour.

About Phil Ostroff

Data Governance

Stop Wasting Data: Build a Future-Proof Strategy With Data Governance

Bob O'Donnell

October 29, 2024

Build a Future-Proof Strategy With Data Governance

These days, it’s hard to find a company that isn’t trying to better itself and become data-driven with advanced analytics, AI, or Generative AI. Enterprises across industries of all types are scrambling to integrate new, emerging technologies into their environments, hoping to get the much-vaunted promise of increased productivity and enhanced capabilities as quickly as they can.

What most organizations promptly discover as part of that process, however, is that getting their data assets organized in a way that will allow them to fully take advantage of these technologies is much harder than it first appears. The reasons are many – from a complex mix of data formats, data silos and data management tools, to uncertainty around how to best manage the process, the data preparation and organization – and collectively, these factors are fast becoming a major stumbling block for many companies.

In fact, according to a recent survey by TECHnalysis Research of IT decision makers in over 1,000 U.S. companies that are doing work with GenAI, Data Preparation and Integration is one of the top five challenges that companies face. In an interesting twist, in an Actian survey of 550 professionals (70% of which were director or higher) in 6 countries and 7 industries, 79% indicated that they believe they’re prepared for GenAI. However, when Gartner asked people in charge of AI data readiness, only 4% said they were ready.

Another problem is that most organizations don’t have any organized governance plans for their data. That same TECHnalysis Research survey found that just under 30% of large enterprises (1,000+ employees) and a whopping 64% of medium businesses (100-999 employees) don’t have governance plans of any kind for their GenAI projects.

One key issue is that many people don’t fully understand what data governance optimization is and why it’s important. On top of that, even organizations that have started to put together data governance policies and procedures don’t know best practices to ensure that they’re getting the right kind of data fed into their algorithms and large language models (LLMs). The net result is a large percentage of organizations aren’t using their critical data as effectively as they could be and that, in turn, typically translates into customized models and applications that aren’t as effective or as productive as they were expected to be. In fact, according to Gartner, by 2027, 60% of organizations will fail to realize the anticipated value of their AI use cases due to incohesive ethical governance frameworks.

To address these issues, companies clearly need not only a wide range of tools to best organize, manage and prepare their data for use, but also a framework and set of guidelines. This ensures that the most effective policies and procedures for acquiring and using data are in place to maximize the return on investment of implementing these emerging technologies.

That’s where a company like Actian, a division of HCL Software, comes into play. Actian currently offers a range of tools designed to organize and optimize a company’s data assets for a wide variety of innovative technologies, including GenAI. This is essential because, as many businesses have already discovered, the quality of the output that an application creates is utterly dependent on the quality of the data its underlying model is trained on. It’s a classic case of garbage in, garbage out—or more positively, high-quality data in, effective, impactful and trustworthy results out.

Actian’s suite of tools tackles everything from data organization to advanced analytics, all designed towards optimizing large volumes of data for ingestion. In particular, the company’s tools have a strong focus on metadata, which is quickly proving to be an essential part of the training process. Essentially, the more accurately and thoroughly an organization’s data can be documented or described via metadata, the more effectively a company can use that data in its training process for multiple applications, including GenAI. Plus, well-documented data can help reduce hallucinations and other misleading output that all LLMs are still occasionally prone to produce.

To help broaden its range of capabilities in these areas, Actian recently completed the purchase of Zeenea, a company that’s built a Data Intelligence Platform centered around a Data Catalog. Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s Data Catalog lets companies organize all their various data assets into a single catalog structure that leverages metadata to create a single searchable repository. This, in turn, helps data consumers within an organization find the information they need via either simple text-based searches or a visual Knowledge Graph. The Knowledge Graph utilizes semantic metadata to link together numerous independent data sources and provide context and easy-to-see visual connections across these data assets.

The latest enhancement to these catalog capabilities is the company’s new Actian Federated Data Catalog, which takes the data cataloging concept to a new level by integrating its capabilities across an organization. This federated catalog leverages a domain-oriented data management approach where the teams most familiar with the data manage their own data assets, permissions, and governance in a dedicated data catalog. Domains can then publish their most valuable data assets in a shared Enterprise Data Marketplace, ready to be consumed as products by all business functions within the organization. By using the same principles and concepts across these different domains, organizations end up with a decentralized, yet consistent data management structure that provides an easier and more effective method for sharing critical data. Most importantly, they do so in a manner that provides a consistent set of governance principles, helping them avoid potential regulatory and other data compliance issues.

In addition to these data preparation and organization tools, Actian also provides its customers with a tested, mature set of data governance solutions and a comprehensive data governance framework to ensure best practices can be leveraged across the data preparation process.

Actian’s effective Data Governance Framework provides a straightforward but comprehensive set of policies and procedures that can help ensure that organizations of different types and with different needs can all get the most from their data assets. More than just a list of rules to follow, the framework has suggestions on organizational structure, questions and topics to be addressed in meetings, strategies for implementing some of the key concepts, and more.

The framework is also designed to help ensure buy-in across an organization’s critical decision-makers—a key make or break point for many advanced projects—as well as offer important practical benefits. For example, a properly followed framework can help organizations stay within any regulatory and legal requirements to which they might be subject, avoid data-driven bias in the output results, prevent loss of critical IP, address any potential ethical issues, and much more.

There’s no question that new technologies, like GenAI and the new kinds of applications the technology is enabling, are opening up some amazing new potential for companies to improve their productivity, stay ahead of their competitors, enhance their bottom line, and become truly “data driven.” At the same time, as with many other new technologies, it’s also opening up the potential for new types of risks and challenges.

As a result, companies who are eager to jump into the new exciting applications of data, like GenAI, need to be certain that they’re well prepared for the adventure. Taken together, Actian’s set of data preparation tools along with the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, Federated Data Catalog and governance framework can help companies have a smooth, organized, and comprehensive data preparation process. Given how important this process is and how much it can impact the ultimate success or failure of advanced data initiatives, it’s clear that it’s a topic that organizations of all types and sizes need to get much smarter about now.

About Bob O'Donnell

Bob O'Donnell is President and Chief Analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC, offering strategic consulting and market research to the technology industry. With a track record of delivering data-driven insights, Bob has advised leading tech firms on market positioning and product strategy. A recognized industry voice, Bob has been featured in publications like USA Today and TechCrunch. Follow him on X @bobodtech or visit his company's website for his latest research. As a guest on the Actian blog, Bob dives into tech trends around analytics, data integration, and cloud innovation. Explore his articles for thought leadership on the future of data.

Data Integration

The Future of Data Integration

Actian Corporation

October 23, 2024

illustration banner of server room for data integration

Big data remains more important than ever to meet the goals of businesses in just about every industry imaginable. Because of data’s value, new advancements are being made every year to help organizations optimize and manage the data they collect and store to the fullest extent possible.

Cloud computing and AI have driven recent advancements in big data integration, helping make data more accessible and higher-quality while remaining secure. And the future of data integration looks even brighter, with innovations currently on the horizon that will allow greater access and better stewardship than ever before. Let’s look at some of the most impactful data integration trends made recently and innovations you’ll hopefully see soon.

Data Integration Trends

Here are eight recent trends and technologies that have contributed to improvements in data integration and will impact future best practices for data integration architectures. If these advancements aren’t on your radar yet, they may be soon.

1. Real-Time Data Integration

Waiting for large volumes of data to be processed before you can gain insights from them is a thing of the past. With a move from batch processing to real-time integration that uses change data capture, you can extract the information you need from your most crucial data quicker than ever — even in real-time. You can analyze massive data repositories by employing parallel processing without straining your system resources, giving you insights at the speed of business.

2. Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has been around for decades, but recent advancements are making it easier for non-coders to set up data storage in the cloud instead of data lakes and data warehouses on physical servers. Cloud computing makes unifying disparate data sources and accessing data much easier, faster, and less costly, and now, no-code and low-code solutions are making it easier to create cloud-native architectures. With edge computing now being integrated into cloud computing tools, data integration can move even faster.

3. The Convergence of ELT and ETL

Because many businesses are moving their data repositories from data lakes to cloud servers, deciding whether to use extract, load, and transform (ELT) or extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes for data integration is becoming less common. A new data integration process with continuous transformations, sometimes called extract, transform, load, and transform (ETLT), is emerging to improve data quality by constantly refining the data for data mesh distribution.

4. No-Code and Low-Code Data Integration

Emerging no-code and low-code — also called “self-service” — cloud architecture tools are improving speed for the future of data integration, but they’re also making overall data integration processes much easier. Many data integration tools and data platforms are being streamlined so that professionals without coding experience can perform collection and analysis tasks that once required specialized expertise. Overcoming data integration challenges for those without coding knowledge means you can share data with more stakeholders who find it valuable.

5. IoT Data Integration

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of internet-enabled electronic devices that can share data with each other. The type and complexity of data these devices can share — and feed into your repository — is advancing, but so is how that real-time data is integrated for business uses. The ever-increasing use of 5G and 5G RedCap makes transmitting data from things like health monitoring devices faster; edge computing advancements make processing the data faster and simplified, while more intuitive iPaaS solutions are making it easier to organize and manage data from multiple data-collecting apps.

6. The Emergence of Data Mesh

First conceived in 2019, this data integration trend provides a business-minded alternative to data lakes that has become popular with organizations that collect large amounts of data, like Netflix and PayPal. Instead of storing data in a central location, it is distributed directly to the sources who need it, allowing faster access and dissemination. Remember that because data is moving straight from collection to analysis, you need to have a structured data conversion process in place so that those receiving the data can make sense of it.

7. AI and Machine Learning

Possibly the most significant critical drivers in making the future of data integration faster, more accessible, and higher quality are advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. Thanks to the recent evolution of AI, systems and processes that once required expert coders to build are now being constructed seamlessly into data integration platforms that allow more people to access trusted data. Machine learning is advanced enough to facilitate retail customer data integration from images, videos, and text, for example, but it also constantly refines and focuses data to make it easier to analyze buying habits. While their impact may not be noticeable now, AI and machine learning will begin streamlining and improving your data integration platforms and tools to increase efficiency, accessibility, and quality.

8. Data Security and Governance

As more data integration processes move to cloud servers, rely less on coded systems and routines, and perform functions in real-time, there’s a huge need for increased cybersecurity and a more nuanced data governance framework. Many of these advancements aim to get more data to stakeholders who need it most but may not be as familiar with protecting it as data professionals are. To this end, Zero-Trust Architecture (ZTA) is becoming more popular, and data access permissions will become more stringent. This requires data governance professionals to focus more on stewardship and access control models that limit access or make it more sophisticated to prevent unauthorized access to data. 

Data Integration Trends: By the Numbers

Data is king, so don’t take our word for these trends shaping the future of data integration. Here are some statistics that provide insights into where the field is headed.

The global data integration market size is expected to reach $17.1 billion by 2025, with $4.87 billion of that belonging to the U.S.
Marketing, including in the retail industry, makes up the largest sector of data integration income at 26%, but HR data integration is growing.
In 2022, 35.5% of organizations chose on-site servers over cloud-based solutions, with 32.3% of these citing cybersecurity concerns and 24.6% worried about proper data integration.
AI and machine learning experienced an 85% increase for SaaS products in late 2023 compared to the year before.
The average breach cost of data stored in public clouds is $5.17 million.
40% of business initiatives fail because of poorly integrated data sets.
Data integration is the fastest-growing Data and AI market, showing 117% growth year-over-year (YoY).
Using AI in data integration processes can improve data quality by up to 20%.

 Download the Data Integration Infographic

Looking Ahead

Since 2023, there has been no expense spared in developing generative AI technology, and the evolution of this technology shows no sign of stopping. Expect to see more AI, GenAI, and machine learning integrations in data processing tools, which should increase the quality of all kinds of data. These technologies should also make processes more streamlined, which can help overcome data integration challenges organizations have concerning cloud-based services. The lines between implementing ELT or ETL will continue to be blurred as more organizations adopt cloud computing, and data structuring and processing become more automated by AI and machine learning.

Data is an ever-growing market, so expect more money to be spent on these data integration trends and other surprising innovations in the coming years. 

A Cutting-Edge Data Integration Platform

You can find many of these data integration trends already hard at work in hybrid integration platforms (HIPs) and solutions like DataConnect from Actian. You can automate data pipelines with low- or no-code, institute business rules and data quality standards that are automatically incorporated into your workflow, and enable real-time data connections.

About Actian Corporation

Actian empowers enterprises to confidently manage and govern data at scale. Actian data intelligence solutions help streamline complex data environments and accelerate the delivery of AI-ready data. Designed to be flexible, Actian solutions integrate seamlessly and perform reliably across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Learn more about Actian, the data division of HCLSoftware, at actian.com.

Securing Your Data With Actian Vector, Part 1

Understanding Encryption at Rest

Using Database Encryption in Actian Vector

A typical workﬂow of using database encryption in Actian Vector:

About Martin Fuerderer

Related Tags

Subscribe to the Actian Blog

Subscribe

Thank you for subscribing to the Actian Blog!

Ready to Get Started?

5 Reasons to Invest in a Next-Gen Data Catalog

1. Overcome Data Silo and Complexity Challenges

2. Solve the Issue of Limited Data Access for Business Users

3. Gain Visibility into Data Origins and Compliance Requirements

4. Provide Ongoing Data Governance

5. Build a Data-Driven Organization

Experience a Live Demo

About Dee Radh

Related Tags

Subscribe to the Actian Blog

Subscribe

Thank you for subscribing to the Actian Blog!

Ready to Get Started?

Actian Zen: The Market-Leading Embedded Database – Proven!

Get to Know Actian Zen

Putting Zen Through its Paces: The TPCx-IoT Benchmark

Discussion of Results: Actian Zen is a Powerful IoT Engine

Next Steps: Get the Report!

About Phil Ostroff

Related Tags

Subscribe to the Actian Blog

Subscribe

Thank you for subscribing to the Actian Blog!

Ready to Get Started?

Spooktacular Fun: Actian Halloween Celebration

Pumpkin Carving Contest

Costume Contest

A Celebration of Team Spirit

About Savannah Bruggeman

Related Tags

Subscribe to the Actian Blog

Subscribe

Thank you for subscribing to the Actian Blog!

Ready to Get Started?

Experience Near-Unlimited Storage Capacity With HCL Informix® 15

HCL Informix: Building an Advanced Database for Modern Enterprise Applications

4GL: Easily maintain and recompile existing 4GL applications

HCL Informix 15 Server Re-Architected for Massive Storage Capacity Improvement

Larger Row and Page Addresses: Manage Large Data Sets Without Compression

External Smartblobs: Store Large Objects With Ease

Invisible Indexes: Optimize Your Queries Faster

Start Your Modernization Project With HCL Informix 15

Informix is a trademark of IBM Corporation in at least one jurisdiction and is used under license.

About Emily Taylor

Related Tags

Subscribe to the Actian Blog

Subscribe

Thank you for subscribing to the Actian Blog!

Ready to Get Started?

The Game-Changing Data Intelligence Platform for Data Democratization

What Sets the Actian Platform Apart for Data Democratization?

4 Key Differentiators Empower Data-Driven Organizations

Modern Capabilities to Advance Data Discovery

Make Data Usable and Accessible to Everyone

About Dee Radh

Related Tags

Subscribe to the Actian Blog

Subscribe

Thank you for subscribing to the Actian Blog!

Ready to Get Started?

Why a Data Intelligence Platform is Business Critical

The Disconnect Between Data and Business Outcomes

Benefit From the Exponential Growth of Data

The Three Critical Questions of Data Management

Key Capabilities of a Modern Data Intelligence Platform

The Business Impact of Data Intelligence

Solving Complexity With the Right Data Intelligence Platform

About Dee Radh

Related Tags

Subscribe to the Actian Blog