The enterprise has moved beyond storing information in a data lake and is now heavily focused on strategically fishing out what is critical, trustworthy and properly governed to run a business.

A need for integration and the right automated tools to make that happen have been further accelerated by the global pandemic and the sudden demand for accurate data, not just in the private sector but among public agencies as well.

“During this COVID pandemic, there is a greater appreciation for trust in data,” said Jitesh Ghai (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of data space management at Informatica LLC. “There’s a tremendous reliance on data, and we’re seeing it in particular in the healthcare provider sector, in the public sector, federal, state and local as all of these organizations are having to make very difficult decisions. They are increasingly relying on high-quality, trustworthy, governed data to help them make what can be life or death decisions.”

Ghai spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, as part of the Informatica CLAIREview interview series. They discussed how updates to Informatica’s platform have fueled “Data 4.0,” the key role of the company’s CLAIRE engine in automated solutions, and meeting the needs of enterprises in a hybrid world. (* Disclosure below.)

Updates drive ‘Data 4.0’

Informatica has responded to the global COVID-19 crisis since March by implementing several changes to its data-driven intelligence platform. In early May, the company released expanded capabilities for its Cloud Data Quality solution and followed that up with updates for its Intelligent Data Platform, which is driven by CLAIRE, the firm’s artificial intelligence-based engine.

Informatica’s latest moves are part of what it characterizes as “Data 4.0,” a computing environment guided by cloud native and intelligent automation.

“AI and machine learning are powering data management, making it more intelligent and automating more of what was historically manual,” Ghai said. “It enables organizations to scale to the breadth of data they need. That’s the era of Data 4.0.”

Support for developers and hybrid

Automating previous manual tasks is a key element of Informatica’s approach. CLAIRE is a cornerstone of Data 4.0, designed to code and script business intelligence and big data platforms.

The goal is to improve a scenario where developers must repeatedly parse various source schemas, understand the target, pick appropriate fields, create a structure through mapping, run a job, and deliver it to a database.

“Through CLAIRE, we’re building out automation in the data quality, integration, master metadata management, and data privacy capabilities,” Ghai explained. “As you pick sources and targets, we’re able to automatically generate the mappings and automate this development part of the process so that organizations can more rapidly build out data pipelines. It’s all built on the foundation of our intelligent data platform.”

The company’s automated solutions are designed to support a hybrid world. Informatica’s microservices-based architecture supports Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure and Snowflake Inc., along with big data platforms such as Cloudera Inc. and data science providers like Databricks Inc.

“Hybrid is an essential capability,” Ghai said. “You don’t need to bring everything to the cloud with you. You need to be able to connect to your on-premises databases and applications and migrate the data that’s important into the cloud.”

Watch the complete video interview as part of the Informatica CLAIREview Series below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Informatica CLAIREview Series. Neither Informatica LLC, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE