Data has gravity, complexity and value. It also has pain points within most enterprises, and this is both a challenge and opportunity for Io-Tahoe LLC to adapt its own business alongside clients through automation.

The company’s platform enables organizations to discover and search data across a wide range of repositories, including data warehouses, data lakes and traditional databases. This has become increasingly important as data volumes have grown exponentially and businesses need to understand the information being collected and gain useful insight from it.

However, Io-Tahoe has also built its platform to focus on the pain points associated with particular business needs, areas that often involve complex policy compliance and data governance. It’s a necessary evolution involving automation technologies to drive change at the pace of modern business.

“We want to come in and not just profile the data, not just understand data quality and lineage, but address the unique needs of every customer that we have,” said Lester Waters, chief technology officer of Io-Tahoe. “It’s the technical metadata coming together with policies and rules, and coming together with business ontologies that are unique to that particular business. Bringing all of this together enables you to bring rapid change into your environment.”

Waters spoke with Lisa Martin, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE, and he was joined by Ajay Vohora, chief executive officer of Io-Tahoe. Martin also spoke with Io-Tahoe’s Yusef Khan, head of data services; Patrick Zeimet, data solutions engineer; and Sabita Davis, enterprise account executive; as well as Santiago Castro, chief data officer at First Bank of Nigeria UK, and Gudron van der Wal, senior manager of digital transformation and industries at Oracle Corp., in separate interviews. The discussion, part of Io-Tahoe’s Data Automation Series “Adaptive Data Governance,” included how Io-Tahoe tailors its solution to adapt to the demands of multiple regulations through automation, how one financial institution is using the firm’s technology to transform data governance, and the company’s evolving partnership with Oracle. (* Disclosure below.)

Watch the full event video below:

Writing custom data rules

One of the most significant pain points encountered by businesses is the growing need to meet standards for regulatory compliance. In today’s computer-driven world, data often sits at the heart of those standards and the penalties for non-compliance can be severe.

In the medical field, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, is the governing standard for sensitive patient data protection. In addition, states across the country are beginning to pass legislation, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, which impacts the use of data collected on e-commerce sites and social media platforms. These and other regulations mean that businesses must stay on top of the data collected to avoid potential fines for non-compliance.

“Within the Io-Tahoe platform, there are over 300 predefined policies, such as HIPAA and CCPA,” Zeimet explained. “One can choose which of these policies to run against the data. A service that Io-Tahoe provides is the ability to write custom data quality rules and understand how the data pertains to these rules.”

What Zeimet described is a process known as Adaptive Data Governance. It’s not enough to simply find the data and know the rules. It’s about enabling the use of the data to be applied in specific situations, equipped with a high level of knowledge and understanding generated through artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“Adaptive data governance is about achieving business outcomes through automation,” Waters said. “It’s important with the bulk of data that we deal with to pass through that data on a single pass and do the analytics that are needed.”

Watch the complete interview with Waters and Vohora below:

Helping a bank transform

The First Bank of Nigeria UK facilitates trade between Europe and Africa, and it has embarked on its own digital transformation. Working with Io-Tahoe and Oracle Corp., FBN revamped its online banking system and launched a mobile application for customers.

That initiative required close attention to meeting international regulatory requirements that are an integral part of the financial world. It was also an opportunity for FBN to rediscover and learn from the data it had previously acquired.

“The new technologies allowed us to discover the data in a new way, to quickly see the information, to have new models of governing the data and giving autonomy to our different data units,” said FBN’s Castro. “From that autonomy they then can compose and innovate in their own way.”

The bank’s transformation underscored the role of automation in driving data governance. Among the solutions FBN introduced, credit automation and machine learning proved to be key in improving operational efficiency.

“We’ve worked with government departments, and the issues there are fragmented data, a lot of different sources, different formats, and without these newer technologies to address it with automation and machine learning, the project isn’t doable,” Khan said. “But now it is, and that could lead to a revolution in some of these businesses. Castro and the team at First Bank of Nigeria are a great example of embracing it, testing it on a small scale and then scaling up.”

Watch the complete interview with Khan, Castro and van der Wal below:

Work with Oracle

The bank’s example also reveals the power of partnership. Io-Tahoe worked with FBN to achieve its transformation through upgrades in an Oracle environment, which included Oracle’s FLEXCUBE as its core banking system.

“A lot of the work that we’re doing with Oracle is through accelerating what customers can do around understanding their data and to build digital apps while identifying the underlying data that has value,” Vohora said. “It’s satisfying to see how we’re able to help businesses transform and redefine what’s possible with their data. Having Oracle as a partner to lean in is definitely helping.”

Regulatory requirements for institutions such as banks are usually the catalyst for data collection. There is no other choice. However, Oracle and Io-Tahoe both work with clients that have been slow to implement data-gathering systems. It is a cautionary tale for these customers, as data privacy laws will inevitably become the ultimate driver.

“If I speak with customers, I always tell them they’d better start collecting their data now,” said Oracle’s van der Wal. “We enable this, and partners like Io-Tahoe help us as well. If you collect your data now, you are ready for tomorrow. You can never collect your data backwards.”

Io-Tahoe has continued to enhance its automation capabilities to further the cause of adaptive data governance. In October, the company launched its SmartData Partner Program to help enterprises streamline data and obtain real-time visibility across organizational silos.

“No matter your role, we’re all dependent on data,” Davis said. “By automating manual tasks, it can definitely save time and money.”

Watch the complete interview with Davis and Zeimet below:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Io-Tahoe’s Data Automation Series “Adaptive Data Governance” livestream event. Neither Io-Tahoe LLC, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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