Three Common Challenges Facing Data Professionals Today

SQL PASS is an exciting learning and connecting experience with thousands of people coming from all over the world and hundreds of speakers discussing a broad range of topics. It’s a great atmosphere of learning and kinship for data professionals that I think is the most notable.

If memory serves me correctly, my first attendance at PASS Summit was eight years ago. The CPT version of SQL 2012, code name Denali, had just been released and much of my focus was around performance tuning, high availability and reporting. The keynote started with a bombastic appearance from a Tina Turner impersonator singing “Simply the Best” followed by a highly technical and impressive presentation of a federated SQL Server database.

For the past few years Delphix has been at SQL PASS, and each time we’ve had the opportunity to connect with more and more companies and help solve for both large and complex as well as tactical challenges of how to better manage data across the enterprise with greater speed and agility than ever before.

Obviously, the demands for data, its size, where it resides and how it’s being consumed are drastically different today and continue to evolve at a staggering rate. Meanwhile, business demands and pressures for speed and efficiency are also ever increasing.

Hence, DevOps and Agile development are two methodologies that have continued to take center stage in the development communities, but of course, the hardest thing to manage for both these initiatives is data. I personally find it exhilarating to help other technologists view their environment differently but also solve for other problems they hadn’t anticipated - all at the same time.

Here are 3 emerging challenges that are relevant to most, if not all, data professionals in today’s software economy - but also themes to anticipate if you’re attending this year’s PASS Summit.

Data Agility and DevOps

The data landscape continues to expand both in depth and breadth as databases get larger and the diversity of technologies broadens. Managing data across platforms while driving efficiency requires new tools and technologies for automation while leveraging existing infrastructure more efficiently. That’s why Implementing an agile and API-driven platform, like Delphix, that enables and empowers data consumers can significantly boost productivity, increase quality as well as minimize downtime.

Data Security

Nearly 75 percent of all data breaches for Fortune 1000 companies occur in their non-production environments. With increasing demands from data consumers (developers, testers and data analysts) and the need to comply with privacy regulations, security becomes a critical enterprise business problem. To solve for this challenge, organizations need to adopt a solution that allows them to protect data, maintain compliance while doing so in a consistent manner across the organization.

You can hear more about this in “GDPR - The Buck Stops Here” on Friday from Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman, a Technical Solution Professional in Power BI with AI in the EdTech group at Microsoft and also a former Delphixer, about leveraging the right data masking technology to help build a secure data pipeline for enterprises.

Cloud Migration and Management

It's no secret that the migration of data and workloads to the cloud, both public and private, has seen exponential growth with no end in sight. Doing a one-time migration is challenging enough, but keeping data up-to-date AND secure can truly seem like an impossible task. For this reason, Delphix has designed native support for Azure and AWS, to enable teams to do just that without a stack of highly customized and specialized tools or an army to build, deploy and manage.

Even within the scope of these three areas alone, the challenges of managing data has never been greater! We’re especially excited to be at PASS Summit 2018 to discuss the challenges ahead and ways we can help pave a path to the future.