Data Provisioning and Automation for Meaningful Business Insights

Nikhil Goel June 13th, 2019

With the increasing demand for businesses making data-driven transformations and improvements, comes the exponentially increasing need for better governance models, processes and automation around accessing data. Data collection, curation, and extraction all rely on timely steps in their respective processes. Some of these steps require human intervention, often from the IT team, while other processes have been improved through data provisioning and automation steps.

Business teams, data engineers, and data scientists must often work through undefined and ad-hoc processes to get access to the data they require. Automation of these processes also requires extensible software integrations so they can be tailored to the needs of an organization.

Real-time access to data depends on there being minimal bottlenecks to ensure rapid time to insights. To orchestrate and streamline these processes for automation, let’s consider a unified and scalable platform approach.

Data provisioning in Zaloni Arena

When you have a platform that can augment and integrate the processes for provisioning, data engineers and business users can quickly do the provisioning work without waiting for IT:

1. Browse and search data catalog.
   
2. Select and define filters on data set, add to cart.
   
3. Provision checkout from the cart.
   
4. Define the destination criteria of the provision (reason, target environment, duration of provision, tools required, etc.) and then set the target environment, for example to the cloud.
   
5. Review your provisioning criteria and let it go through an approval workflow that’s automated by Zaloni Arena.
   

Businesses get more value from self-service data access

By automating the majority of the processes that are required for provisioning data, IT teams remove barriers to data. The number of tools that it takes to initiate and coordinate these processes is also significantly reduced. IT teams can also be assured that this type of self-service access still provides a level of governance and security to comply with varied and complex requirements.

And when IT removes these barriers to data, business users have more control and predictability over where and how they get data. Data engineers and analysts can kick off provisioning workflows to extract from entire data sets, even if they only have limited business info to start with. They can also rely on consistency in the data sets, making it easier to revise and refine per retrieval.

Empowering analysts with quality, trusted data

Analysts crave data. The more quality trusted data they have access to, the deeper and richer the insights they can provide. By removing IT from the workload and promoting self-service access to data, businesses begin to realize what it means to have insights to inform their decisions, ideate on new products and respond to the marketplace.

Aligning data to the business is a key benefit of using Arena. Not only are Zaloni customers providing self-service access to data, but they are also able to do it at scale so that each business unit has access to the data that they need for extraction. It’s the practice of turning their once passive data catalogs into active data hubs.

You can learn more about what an active data hub can do for your organization in this white paper: Achieving DataOps Success with an Active Data Catalog

about the author

Nikhil Goel

Nikhil was a part of the Zaloni team as a data solutions architect then a seniro product manager. He now is Director of Product at Varo Bank.