Creating data lakes and warehouses in the cloud can augment your analytics environment, helping to provide evidence for making informed decisions. But getting there requires bringing together disparate data sources, often from data silos and multiple clouds, which can expose an organization to risk.
A data ingestion pipeline allows you to securely insert your data into a cloud-based data lake or warehouse.
The evolution of data ingestion
Data ingestion involves transferring raw data—whether structured, semi-structured, or unstructured—from various source locations to a target location where it can be stored, processed, and analyzed.
For example, you might be bringing source data from Azure or AWS into a data warehouse on Google Cloud. Developing a data ingestion pipeline and separating data into an isolated staging area before consumption can help to ensure your hybrid environment stays secure—while ensuring that users can only access data they are allowed to access.
Advanced solutions allow you to ingest data in real time, transform data into predefined formats and automate tasks. But this is only valuable if strong security controls and governance are in place. It’s also critical to ensure this process is in compliance with relevant corporate policies, industry best practices, and government regulations. Some data may need to be encrypted or anonymized prior to analytic consumption in a data warehouse.
Creating a data staging area to enforce security best practices
Ensuring data security requires extending your information security best practices into the data platform. Data staging is a step in the process where raw data is “staged” in an isolated area, so it can be processed for consumption without exposing it across the organization—such as anonymizing it for your target warehouse.
By creating an isolated data staging area, you can safely use cloud data platform tools and services to prepare that data for consumption and create a single source of truth—allowing you to test, cleanse and transform the data with governance and controls in place for optimal data security.
This gives data owners full control over their data, ensuring that private, sensitive, or confidential data is subject to data handling and security policies. So when you’re ready to run analytics, it can be done consistently and securely while respecting regulations and guidelines.
Pythian’s Secure Data Ingestion QuickStart
Pythian’s Secure Data Ingestion QuickStart can get you up and running quickly. This offering brings together different data sources needed by a single data custodian for a specific use case and then establishes the data ingestion strategy and infrastructure needed to underpin data and analytics solutions.
Get in touch with a Pythian Google Cloud expert and see how our team can help.
