Technology is moving to the cloud everywhere you look, and metadata management is no exception.
These days, technology is all about the cloud.
This wasn’t always the case—although the technology that enables cloud storage, database, computing resources, and applications
Much of the resistance had to do with security concerns:
If my data is hosted on someone else’s server and accessible via the internet, how is the security of that data even possible, much less guaranteed? Isn’t my data much more secure when it’s in my own data center?
Eventually, cloud providers like Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Microsoft Azure were able to put these concerns to rest by building solid encryption and security into their service offerings.
The Many Advantages of the Cloud
Once security protocols were in place, enterprises could focus on the advantages of moving their data and applications to the cloud:
-Reduced hardware acquisition and maintenance costs: Companies no longer have to buy servers, maintain them through their service life, and replace them.
-Reduced ongoing costs: Many cloud service offerings charge only for the time used; companies don’t have to pay for electricity to run and cool idle servers.
-Greater availability: Cloud-based virtual servers can easily be configured for seamless failover to other servers in the event of an outage.
-Disaster recovery: A major outage at your data center is not nearly as severe when all your critical data assets and applications are also on remote servers.
Data Management (and Metadata Management) Finally Joins the Cloud Revolution
One of the last major business systems to find its place in the cloud is Business Intelligence (BI). BI systems are today still mostly on-premise, but we’re seeing a shift here as organizations are opting to modernize their BI tools to cloud solutions such as Microsoft Power BI. With BI moving to the cloud, it’s time for the data – and with it, data management – to make the leap as well.
Data management (and metadata management) on the cloud enables unprecedented ease of use, self-service dashboard design and implementation for business users, and easy updates and upgrades.
Making the shift to modern data management is essential, but it is also challenging. Whether you’re updating the back-end by migrating your data warehouse to the cloud or advancing the front-end with a shift from legacy BI tools to self-service analysis and visualization, it is critical to know the data that you have and to understand data lineage.
Data inventory, data glossary, and data lineage all depend on accurate metadata. But legacy BI metadata is typically proprietary, non-integrated, and collected inconsistently by a variety of disparate tools. The metadata muddle is a serious inhibitor to modernization efforts, which is why so many organizations are moving their metadata management to the cloud too.
Metadata management automation on the cloud
Metadata consolidation and centralization are the keys to data management modernization, and the same advantages that motivate companies to ditch their legacy, on-premise CRM systems in favor of Salesforce are relevant when managing enterprise metadata. Why?
Because Metadata Management Automation:
-Reduces errors and improves quality of results from data management modernization projects
-Works together with data cataloging to help enterprises move rapidly to the next generation of BI and analytics
-Reduces metadata disparity
-Accelerates modernization efforts
Key capabilities of cloud-based metadata management automation:
-Crawl tools to collect metadata
-Store metadata in one repository
-Index metadata and see connections
-Fast, efficient metadata searching
-Visual mapping of data lineage
-Drill from summary to detail
-Export for external uses
-Inject into data catalogs
Metadata discovery and management are essential to modern BI. With your data and BI tools migrating to the cloud, shouldn’t your metadata management be, too?
