Collibra in the sky (with diamonds): Collibra’s transition to the cloud

1. Intro

Ok, so Data Citizens 2020, the ‘digital experience’ took place between 16/06 & 30/06/2020. This time online. Did we rather want to go to New York instead of the online format? Obviously. Still, Collibra managed to inspire us all virtually by sharing interesting use cases, testimonials & new features to be excited about.

So what are the pillars of the next generation? Simple.

• Cloud Native
• API first

• Edge computing
• Everywhere

In the coming weeks, we will share more details about each one of them. Let’s already shine a light on the Cloud Native pillar and what it means for your organisation when you upgrade to the new version of Collibra.

2. Cloud native

During the last year Collibra has been building its next generation Data Intelligence Cloud. As mentioned by Collibra’s Chief Product Officer Jim Cushman a lot can change in 10 years:

“Nearly any product that is around for 10 years:

- is going to pick up some technical debt; and/or

- going to identify some architectural or implementation decisions that you would make differently now; and/or

- A new standard or method or tool has becoming proven that was not there 10 years ago and/or

- …”

To put things short there are plenty of reason to change a product over time, definitely if you have evolved like Collibra did. Let’s focus on the Cloud Native pillar and break up that monolithic technology in services that offer a.o. scale, reliability and observability. Collibra is ready for the future!

Collibra is moving all its applications to one public Cloud, branded the ‘Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud’. Are you still using an on-premise data center? Time to switch because the next big release of Collibra will be available only in the Cloud. We helped several of our clients to move to Collibra on the Cloud during the last couple of months (and will help during the next few months). So don’t hesitate to reach out and discuss how you can make this switch.

Going to the Cloud, what does this mean for you and your organisation? What is Collibra offering? When we take a closer look at one of the pictures from last year’s data citizens, we can already see that Collibra wanted to go towardsa horizontally scalable, enterprise-grade, secure & compliant Cloud Data Intelligence solution. Let’s now have a look into what this means according to us.

2.1. Horizontally scalable?

This is a way of scaling that enhances the performance of a server node by adding more instances of that server to the existing pool of servers consequently allowing the load to be equally distributed. Still Greek to you? No worries, here are 3 advantages that will support your and Collibra’s growth:

• More efficient due to instant and continuous availability
• More effective because it is easy to size and resize properly to your needs
• Lower overall infra related costs with no limit to hardware capacity

2.2. Enterprise-grade?

Collibra will continue to focus on being operable from the common browsers along with mobile platforms like Android and iOS. We strongly believe that their ‘Everywhere!’ and ‘API First Approach’ focus will even improve the accessibility of their solution via integration with reporting tools,

collaborations systems & operational systems and additional functionalities in their (mobile) applications. Practical example: select a term in your mail like ‘Financial KPI Dashboard’ and search it in Collibra Everywhere via a hotkey. Did you find something interesting? Just share it with your colleague via the share button in Collibra Everywhere. More to come on this topic in our next blogposts!

2.3. Secure & Compliant?

We don’t need to tell you how much Collibra focusses on helping you be secure and compliant. Their Data Privacy is a splendid example: a product that delivers privacy from a foundation that centralizes, automates and guides privacy workflows. Privacy by design is embedded, enabling teams across departments to collaborate and operationalise privacy. By awakening the value of data, Collibra accelerates an organisation’s ability to address global regulatory requirements. (discover more).

You might still have privacy and risk concerns, since sharing your private and confidential information with Collibra is something you would like to avoid. Let us reassure you: Collibra connects to data sources without moving the actual data. Collibra will extract the data where you are storing it.As a result it will only receive encrypted (meta)data. No personal nor sensitive data is leaving your enterprise! More about that in the ‘Edge Computing’ blogpost coming soon!

3. The diamonds in the sky: new cloud-only features
So what are some the key takeaways you definitely need to remember from this article? Well the new version of Collibra will be cloud-only, so the transition is coming either way. But this means your do not have to worry about the infrastructure on which Collibra is running. Collibra ensures this is scaled efficiently and effectively to your organisation and it is managed by Collibra once you move to the cloud. It allows for more flexibility as Collibra will be accessible everywhere, whether you are at home, commuting or on your mobile, Collibra can be accessed at all time. It also ensures business continuity as data in the cloud is backed up on a secure and safe location and available for you at all time, minimising downtime and loss of productivity. And finally, cloud computing allows for a continuous monitoring of security risks regardless of your unique organisational environment. But there is even moreto look forward to in the new versions of Collibra’s products: new features that are only possible in the cloud. Even more reasons to think about transitioning now.

Data scoring is one of those features. It’s a component of the Data Catalog: automatic computation of data quality on attribute level, decreasing the time analysts need to look for good data. Moreover, Collibra’s new version also offers individual rights management as a part of their Data Privacy product. And finally, there’s also good news from lineage and connectivity side. Collibra’s Technical Lineage tool is improved drastically, it connects (& will connect) to more sources* and visualizes transformations. As well as expanded connectivity to Data Lakes and Warehouses to ingest metadata into Collibra quicker.

* In the pipeline are a.o. Sybase, SSIS & Datastage technical lineages,

Should you want to assess a migration from Collibra on-premise to cloud (incl. an upgrade), feel free to reach out to [email protected]. We’d be happy to support you.

Thank you and stay tuned!