Cloud data governance: data platform turns data into a key business asset

As companies continue to collect large amounts of data, many of them are looking to leverage that data to grow revenue by monetizing their data. TMX Group, the leading financial services and stock exchange company based in Canada, operates equities, fixed income, derivatives, and energy markets exchanges and was looking for a way to organize and manage their cloud data governance to make data available to analysts and business users to serve use cases such as monetizing data for revenue growth and providing 360-degree customer views to improve customer experience and uncover cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. 

Challenge: TMX had a complex data environment with data sprawled across the organization. Facing challenges connecting and integrating their siloed data sources, the company wanted to centralize, augment and enrich data sets. They also wanted to provide enriched, trusted data to lines of business in a way that was governed and traceable through a self-service data marketplace. 

This would allow the company to provide broader on-demand accessibility, while ensuring data privacy and security to meet IT and industry regulations.

In order to build their new data environment, they needed to build a flexible and scalable on-demand cloud data governance platform using AWS. The company ran into some technical challenges trying to integrate several 3rd party technologies and validate their AWS stack. 

Solution: Instead of purchasing and integrating several point products, TMX selected Zaloni®’s DataOps platform, Arena, because it provided the capabilities needed to quickly and effectively build their enterprise data lake on AWS through a single unified platform.  

Arena on AWS provided end-to-end data management, governance and self-service access to data scientists and business users within the company through a data marketplace. Arena connects to any data source whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud, and ingests a variety of data types into the data lake. The data is cataloged and metadata is captured. Data is then profiled and classified to help automate the process of identifying sensitive or potentially not useful data.

At this point in the process, additional business and technical metadata may be added to further enhance the catalog. Data can continue to be enriched or improved via data quality and data transformations as part of the data management phase.

Finally, data is available for consumption in Arena through the data catalog, making it easy for analysts and end users to quickly find trusted data and provision that data to an analytics tool, business intelligence application, cloud data warehouse, or other destination.

Results: Arena has enabled TMX to centralize and manage an AWS data lake, create “golden records” of their customer data, and provide governed access to analysts and data scientists. Arena ensured regulatory compliance and reduced risk by applying governance throughout the data supply chain from data source to data consumer. This level of governance has accelerated the use of data within the organization by making it easy for data consumers to access the data they need in a quick self-service manner while maintaining the level of control required by IT.  

The flexible and responsive architecture successfully made data a key enterprise asset within the company. Their enterprise data lake on AWS serves as the foundation for use cases such as data monetization, advanced analytics and customer 360.