Talend has announced improvements to the Talend Data Fabric, its integration and data governance platform. The Talend Data Fabric combines data integration, application integration, data integrity, and data governance to achieve healthier corporate data. The update provides enhancements across the fabric with new integrations, improvements to security and data governance.
Today, data is critical for evidence-based decision making in organisations. Despite this, 78% still have challenges making data-driven decisions, according to a recent study by Talend. This is rarely because of a lack of data, although access to data still limits some. Rather, it is because of a lack of trust in that data. 60% of respondents in the study said they do not always trust the data in their organisation. Talend Data Fabric aims to improve that trust by bringing healthier data into the decision-making process.
Krishna Tammana, CTO, Talend, commented, “One of the biggest crises businesses face today is a lack of agility caused by untimely, inaccessible, incomplete, and inaccurate data. With Talend’s latest release, we’re helping data professionals connect, share, and improve their data faster and more securely. These innovations represent one step in our ongoing journey to help our customers put healthier data at the center of their businesses.”
Enterprise Times also asked Thomas Steinborn, VP Products, Talend, about the update. It contains three major area of enhancements.
Integration improvements
Talend has introduced a new self-service API Portal within the Talend Cloud API Designer. The API portal enables an organisation to centralise the documentation for APIs and microservices then share them from a single place for both internal teams and external partners. During the creating process, organisations can add custom content and branding before publishing to a repository. The API Portal supports deployment to:
- GitHub Pages
- AWS Amplify
- Azure Static Web Apps
- Docker
Ultimately the API portal makes it easier for developers to access information about the APIs and microservices they can use. It will ensure consistency and improve productivity in the corporate developer ecosystem.
The second improvement sees Talend support native integration with Databricks 7.3 and AWS EMR 6.2 on Apache Spark 3. The integration with Databricks and AWS is not new; as Steinborn commented, “Talend is unique in having always provided native integration support for Databricks and AWS EMR. With this release, we continue to help our customers leverage advanced analytics in the cloud for big data with support for the more recent versions of Databricks and AWS EMR on Apache Spark 3.0.”
Thirdly there is a new connector to RabbitMQ, the open-source message-broker software.
Improvements to security
Talend has made available private links to either AWS or Azure. The advantages of these private links are both increased security and improved performance for data transfers. Furthermore, they are simpler to deploy than VPNs and provide better compliance with local data protection and industry regulations such as PCI and HIPAA.
Enterprise Times asked Steinborn where the new connections are located. He replied, “All Talend regions in the US, EU, Japan, and Australia support private links and can connect to anywhere in the world. For best performance, we advise customers to partner with their regional data centre and, where applicable, leverage their dedicated uplink to AWS or Azure.”
Will Talend make additional private connections available to other cloud providers such as NTT, Google, IBM or Oracle?
“Talend is considering opening up more private connections. However, we do not currently have sharable timelines. We do recommend our customers consider vendors like InCountry to solve data privacy concerns with those mentioned providers.”
This release also sees an improvement to single sign-on and multi-factor authentication capabilities to the latest best practices, according to Talend. Steinborn noted that these updates come at no additional costs and are available to all customers. Single Sign-On is available to all Talend cloud customers. When asked, Steinborn also revealed more detail about the multi-factor authentication enhancements.
Steinborn added, “Talend currently supports single sign-on and multi-factor authentication for leading SSO providers, including Okta, OneLogin, PingFederate, and Microsoft Azure Active Directory. Typical multi-factor authentication mechanisms supported are the vendors’ specialized apps, hardware tokens like YubiKeys, or push to mobiles.”
Data Governance improvements
It is now possible to add read/write capabilities to a data quality or governance “campaign” directly from a data pipeline. This helps deliver faster and more scalable data quality processes for business subject matter experts. Within the Talend Cloud Data Stewardship module, there is also a new Data Quality rules tab that enables users to quickly create and modify data quality rules in data models to detect anomalies in Merging and Resolution campaigns.
Steinborn explained further, saying, “We’ve extended existing applications to facilitate greater collaboration on data governance at scale. New enhancements to our Data Stewardship self-service application provide greater autonomy to subject matter experts and tighter coupling of the Data Stewardship application to data pipelines built with cloud-native applications (i.e.Pipeline Designer).”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Healthy data is critical to the success of digital transformations of organisations across the globe. Talend has iteratively improved its features with this release. A fact not lost on its customers. Rachell Powell, Senior Application Development Manager at Ferguson Enterprises, commented, “Talend continues to innovate and provide us with data governance capabilities that aid our business users in operating with more autonomy. The ability to manage data in campaigns directly without IT intervention, while at the same time retaining the ability to collaborate with IT when needed, gives us the agility to speed when it matters the most.”
This is not the huge leap forward in functionality that rival Precisely recently achieved through its acquisitions of Winshuttle to improve data management and Infogix for data governance. However, the addition of the private network links shows that Talend understands that organisations are now choosing to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. It will be interesting to see which other providers Talend adds, and how soon. The result of this update is that Talend customers will gain even greater confidence in their data security and validity. Perhaps, next year the percentage that trusts their data for decision making will increase.
Talend will publish more information about the update in their blog.
