Hi all,
I wanted to share with you all some recent experience we have had with customers who have just introduced Delphix into their companies, and how it can be a 'game changer' when it comes to removing those pesky data related defects for your critical applications. But there are valid reasons for 'Subsetting' your data in non-production environments or even using 'Synthetic Data', and we will get to these later on.
Firstly, why is reducing data related defects important for your business?
Having been a customer of Delphix previously, and actually used Delphix to help recover a Production Database from an 'Application down' scenario I know first hand that Delphix's 'Data Time Machine' capability is fantastic. But in an ideal scenario the data related application outage doesn't happen at all.
Delphix provides full virtual copies of your production data within minutes, so whereas before Delphix, you may have had no choice but to subset your data to make it consumable by developers, testers and data scientists, you can now avoid subsetting and therefore removing the risk of not uncovering data related defects during testing. Shifting-left can have a massive impact to your business, and in a recent IDC study it showed that you can reduce data related defects by up to 70% by using Delphix, massively reducing the level of business risk in your business.
There is a valid use-case for subsetting even with Delphix, for example, we have customers who have full regression tests which take 10-12 hours due to the data size. So, you may want to perform early testing on subsets of that data, before eventually using the full copy of prod data to test before releasing to production. At this point, It's worth reminding you that your Delphix Virtual Database is just like a normal Database, so your 3rd party subsetting tool of choice will fully integrate with Delphix, although we have partnered with GenRocket to demonstrate this particular use-case.
Another important aspect to consider is the security of your data.....Do you need to secure your data before it can be provided to consumers and provisioned in non-production environments?
Many of our customers move away from using synthetic data to address this problem because it's complicated and expensive to maintain. Again, there is a valid use-case for synthetic data and we will get to that shortly.....
Delphix includes a class-leading solution for masking your data, and because it's integrated with our virtualisation platform, we can easily provide a solution to address any GDPR regulations or internal security processes, whilst still maintaining business logic and referential integrity of your data. When we prove that you no longer need to use synthetic data, and put up with various data related defects and more of those pesky Production outages this really does delight our customers. I came across a survey recently that found that the number one wish for CIO's was to reduce production outages as they are expensive, impact reputation and can even lead to huge fines for their businesses.
I promised to explain the valid use-case for using synthetic data and that would of course be at the beginning of a brand new green-field application, but very quickly that application will need to be tested and before you know it data is becoming a bottleneck again. That's why again, we partner with GenRocket so that our customers can quickly utilise the power of Delphix to distribute super-fast data to your testers etc. even if originally the data was created synthetically by GenRocket or another synthetic data tool.
Having been responsible for ensuring data is secure and available for development and testing as well as ensuring Production is up and running, for much of my career, it's fantastic I can now show how you can address these challenges without having to cut any corners. Using Secure full Production data will always lead to better results, and with Delphix delivering this data wherever and whenever you need it, whether it's on-premise or in the cloud, immediately to the fingertips of your data consumers, we can drive your digital transformation programmes as well as reducing the cost of doing this.
On average, our customers gain return on their investment in under 9 months..........
If you have any questions on the above anything, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Regards
Chay