Xmon integrates with EDM (Enterprise Data Management) systems allowing firms using them to increase their benefits and optimise their data usage even further.
EDM systems facilitate the management and governance of a firm’s data, which would otherwise be prone to inconsistencies, inefficiencies, security breaches among other issues. Xmon complements an EDM solution by providing transparency, control and cost optimisation.
Transparency
Xmon allows tracking every data request that flows within the firm, whether it is an internal request from a data consumer to the EDM system or an external request from the EDM system to a data vendor. If the EDM system provides data caching as one of its services, Xmon can compute the cost saving or the ROI (Return on Investment) achieved by the caching mechanism as the difference between the cost of all internal requests and the cost of all external requests. This allows evaluating the efficiency of the cache and fine-tuning it further through request-level analysis.
Additionally, through the integration with the EDM system, Xmon can access the user consumption data, which it then uses to allocate the data costs fairly and accurately across the user base by employing its powerful data dictionary and data mapping capabilities.
Data lineage is yet another benefit achieved by this integration as Xmon allows tracing all fields requested by the EDM system from data vendors to check that they are actually used by, or distributed to, at least one of the internal data consumers. This makes it straightforward to then verify the business rationale for each field requested in order to limit requests to the data actually used and needed – one really good way to ensure costs are always optimised.
Control
As part of its useful toolkit, Xmon offers a powerful Rules Engine which allows different levels of monitoring over reference data spend in real-time. This monitoring ranges from soft-limit rules which issue alerts or warnings when certain limits are breached to hard-limit rules which interrupt expensive or questionable requests for review and investigation before they are directed to the vendor, or even block them altogether if needed. Use-cases can be cost-driven such as issuing a warning when a certain data consumer exceeds a certain daily volume or cost limit or compliance-driven such as blocking certain users from requesting a specific data category. By interfacing to the EDM platform, Xmon obtains all the usage information required for implementing the needed control.
Cost Optimisation
By drilling down into internal (user-to-EDM) requests and external (EDM-to-vendor) requests, Xmon can explore further optimisations for data management and identify opportunities for cost reductions and savings. It can detect duplication patterns in requests at the data field level as well as the security level and offer recommendations and best-practice tips for mitigating MultiHit costs by leveraging the caching capabilities of the EDM system among others. Xmon can also suggest alternative methods for sourcing reference data, for example using Bulk Data provision from certain vendors, and allows users to simulate these methods to gauge their cost benefits before switching to them.
The benefits of integrating Xmon with an EDM System
To find out more about how Xmon can integrate with EDM platforms or to request a product demo, please contact us. We would love to hear from you!