The Hidden Perks of Data Virtualization

Data virtualization solutions can help organizations provide real-time access to data from various sources across the enterprise and beyond. Data virtualization can facilitate data-driven decisions so organizations can quickly analyze a new opportunity or manage risk. The speed at which data is made available to decision-makers once requested can make a huge difference; the difference between remaining in business or closing permanently. This agility and responsiveness are key benefits of data virtualization.

Data virtualization plays a crucial role in uncovering insights deeply buried inside systems that are scattered across an enterprise. To successfully uncover insights, the data must be accessed, combined and curated into valuable data products before being made available for consumption. This fundamental capability of data virtualization can lead to significant cost savings by eliminating the need for physical data movement across the networks. Organizations benefit by reducing the infrastructure and maintenance costs associated with data movement.

It must be noted that any conversation about data virtualization without addressing performance is an incomplete conversation. All the modern and leading data virtualization solutions have addressed performance in their own ways by using both proprietary and non-proprietary techniques for optimizing performance. While the performance of data virtualization solutions usually takes center stage in most conversations (and rightly so), we will leave that discussion for another time and focus instead on the more underrated range of features and capabilities.

Since data from multiple sources in the organization (such as databases, cloud services and applications) can be accessed, blended and analyzed as if it were all stored in a single, easily accessible location, securing and protecting sensitive data becomes a huge concern and, in many scenarios, a regulatory requirement.

Today, leading data virtualization solutions generally have robust security capabilities that give organizations the option of using the solution to create a secure perimeter around the data landscape and a front door to the data. Doing so dramatically simplifies the management of security policies and centralizes the management in one place.

Here are four common capabilities that come as an unexpected security benefit of using data virtualization:

1. Role-based access control (RBAC): Assign permissions based on a user's role or function within the organization.
2. Fine-grained access control (FGAC): Allows organizations to precisely regulate who can access specific data and under what conditions by enabling administrators to define access policies within a view based on a wide range of attributes like user or group memberships, conditions and data attributes.
3. User authentication and authorization: Verifies user identities and ensures they have the necessary permissions to access data.
4. Data masking: Protects sensitive data through masking techniques such as tokenization, which replaces sensitive information with unique tokens, and generalization, which replaces specific values with broader categories. These methods allow for secure testing, development and analysis without compromising privacy.

The ability to connect to many heterogeneous data sources, scan them and extract relevant metadata, such as data types and relationships, is the cornerstone of data virtualization solutions. This is one of the main reasons why these platforms can provide unified and consolidated views of data across the enterprise. The views are created based on the extracted metadata and any discovered relationships.

These capabilities enable data discovery, facilitate self-service to data and reduce the dependence on IT departments for data requests. Users can independently search for data assets through a business-like user interface across these systems without needing to know the specifics of each underlying data source or the complex relationships that may exist.

Many data virtualization platforms also offer users a way to depict data lineage visually. These visual representations help users see how different data assets are interconnected, making it easier to trace data back to its original source and understand its journey through various transformations and integrations along the way. Data lineage capabilities are also crucial for meeting regulatory requirements. Data virtualization helps document and demonstrate compliance by providing detailed records of data movement and transformations, which is valuable during audits, investigations and impact assessments.

Data virtualization platforms offer various data delivery methods to accommodate the needs of different data consumers and applications.

Many platforms offer fast and efficient data access by utilizing high-performance query engines. These engines are designed to handle large volumes of data quickly, ensuring low-latency responses. As a result, users can interact with and retrieve data in real time, which is crucial for applications that require up-to-the-moment information.

More importantly, these platforms support well-known protocols such as Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) and Open Database Connectivity (ODBC), making it easy for users to connect and query data using familiar tools and programming languages without needing to learn new technologies. This combination of speed, scalability and ease-of-use makes these platforms highly effective for a wide range of data-driven applications.

For web and mobile applications, data virtualization platforms may expose data through RESTful web services, delivering data in formats such as JSON, XML, or HTML. Some platforms support modern API standards such as OData and GraphQL to make data retrieval more flexible and efficient. Additionally, data can be exported to common formats such as CSV and Microsoft Excel for offline analysis or integration with other tools.

These data delivery and publication capabilities are useful in creating centralized data hubs and data marketplaces for an organization's data. This streamlines access to information, eliminating the need for consumers to rely on data that is not curated or endorsed by subject matter experts or data owners.

The unique combination of features and capabilities found in leading data virtualization platforms makes them a compelling solution for your data management challenges. It is entirely plausible to consider implementing data virtualization to reap the rewards of one of these auxiliary benefits, but usually, they are merely sweetening the pot. However, once implemented, these unexpected or underappreciated capabilities grow in importance and utilization.