Self-service data analytics for tech laymen sounds fantastic, but what becomes of governance and security with the door to sensitive data left open?

“As data gets democratized, the security issues become bigger and broader,” said Amit Walia (pictured), executive vice president and chief product officer at Informatica LLC.

Nonetheless, his company stubbornly wants to stay friends with security while also decentralizing data for access by anyone in an enterprise, Walia stated.

In an interview with John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during Informatica World in San Francisco, California, Walia restated that Informatica wants to be “the Google for enterprise data.” (* Disclosure below.)

To meet that goal, Informatica has to deal with roadblocks that Google does not. Google searches mainly public data, while Informatica wants to make all data searchable to enterprises — public, private, structured and unstructured. For instance, social data from sites like Twitter is very valuable to enterprises that want to profile customers, Walia said.

“That’s unstructured data, but it’s about you and me,” he stated, adding that a tweet can often make consumer behavior much easier to forecast.

Highly classified data presents obvious additional challenges.

To pull these disparate data together quickly enough so that staffers in marketing, for instance, can act on them requires integrated metadata and self-service analytics. “But IT also wants to make sure it’s business users accessing it … there’s governance, security, compliance issues, right?” Walia said.

The hope is that Informatica’s accessible machine learning tool CLAIRE and Secure@Source data security intelligence software together can make securely governed, democratized data analytics doable, Walia explained.

“That’s a very high bar for ourselves,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Informatica World 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Informatica World. Neither Informatica Corp. nor other sponsors have editorial influence on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE