- August 11, 2022
- Tech
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- Digital
"Data virtualisation offers companies agility while allowing them to regain control of data sovereignty"
Following his speech at IT Days, Olivier Tijou (Regional VP - France, Belgium, Luxembourg & Switzerland, Denodo) tells us more about data virtualization and discusses data sovereignty.
Olivier
Tijou, you are Regional Vice President for France, Belgium, Luxembourg and
Switzerland at Denodo. Can you tell us about the company?
Denodo is a
company that was founded in Spain in 1999. We are the market leader in data
virtualisation. Our mission is to enable simplified, faster and unified access
to any type of enterprise data source for agile BI, big data analytics, web and
cloud integration, single view applications and enterprise data services,
without replicating data, at half the cost of traditional approaches.
What
needs does data virtualisation meet?
Despite Big
Data initiatives, many companies today have problems accessing and consuming
data, and this is a problem that is common to most companies. Data
virtualisation is designed to solve this problem by simplifying the navigation
of all enterprise data through a virtualisation layer, without replicating any data.
With the
pandemic and the massive shift to remote working, have you found that companies
are facing additional difficulties?
The
pandemic has shown that the traditional approach to data access, which involves
extraction and replication, is no longer sufficient. Companies need to access
data in real time. They need agility more than ever and the crisis has only
increased the initiatives in which access to data becomes even more critical.
What are
the challenges of data in a crisis context?
There is a
need for agility in what is called time to data. In a crisis context, companies
must be reactive and make the right decisions, especially when they have to
manage remote employees. When everything is going well and there is no crisis,
companies have the time and the budget to get the data. Things are a bit
different in times of crisis, you have to be able to adapt very quickly and
have the right data at the right time. Data virtualisation allows you to be
much faster and more efficient in delivering the data that decision-makers
need.
What
about the cloud? Have you seen a greater need for migration?
Of course!
The crisis has accelerated a trend that was already underway to rationalise IT
infrastructures by migrating more and more data and applications to the cloud.
Data virtualisation is helping companies to make this transition by making it
safer and faster, and on top of that, it helps to deliver on the promise of
saving money by putting data in the cloud. When migrating to the cloud,
companies should not simply copy and paste their on-premise data to the cloud.
This would have a huge environmental impact! Data virtualisation allows them to
streamline their move to the cloud to be more efficient with data storage; it
allows them to do it the right way.
The
cloud raises a number of questions about data sovereignty. What are the
benefits of data virtualisation in this case?
To put it
simply, data virtualisation offers companies agility while allowing them to
regain control of data sovereignty. We could say that companies that use this
technology keep the "keys" to their database. As an example, one of
our Luxembourg customers in the banking sector uses data virtualisation to gain
agility in a constantly changing European financial ecosystem. Data
virtualisation makes all choices transparent to data consumers within the
company.
Can you
give us other examples of Luxembourg customers who have taken advantage of data
virtualisation?
Sure. We
have had a customer from the heavy industry sector for years. Data
virtualisation, which they use massively, is now an essential part of their
data ecosystem and enables them to optimise their infrastructure. With the
trade war between the United States and China, the industry has been severely
impacted and the players in the sector need the freshest possible data to be
responsive.