Xplore: Find out about our data discovery and data inventory platform

 

We are excited to introduce you to Xplore, our Data Discovery and Metadata Management tool.

In today’s world, firms across industries generate and consume vast amounts of data that come from and go to several internal and external data sources.

Firms struggle to:

  • Discover and leverage existing data assets, so they duplicate data or pay for it multiple times.
  • Enforce usage entitlement and compliance, so they face eye-watering fines for failing to use data in a compliant way.
  • Ensure data quality and trustworthiness, so they waste valuable time and money because of poor data quality.

 

Xplore as a Data Discovery and Metadata Management Platform

 

Xplore can be used to tackle all these problems:

  • Xplore facilitates exploring data sources and discovering existing and sometimes hidden datasets.
  • Xplore enables organising datasets into an inventory that is easy to search and navigate.
  • Xplore allows managing technical and business metadata.
  • Xplore helps in managing permissions to control which users can access which datasets.

In this article, the first of a series of articles about Xplore, we will shed light on Data Discovery.

 

What is data discovery?

 

Data discovery is the process of exploring the various data sources across the different departments or silos of a firm and uncovering the different data assets on them. This is a vital step for mapping what data assets are available and making them available for as many data users as possible.

 

How does Xplore discover data?

 

Xplore facilitates data discovery by allowing you to register DataStores and potentially crawl them to discover their DataSets. A DataStore is any source of data or repository where data can be stored, such as a database, a cloud storage location, an internal drive, a data vendor account etc. Once you register a DataStore, you can launch a crawler on it which will discover the different DataSets that exist there. A DataSet is any data asset that your company owns, whether internally generated or externally sourced from providers or vendors in any of the multitude of structured and unstructured data formats. This data discovery brings to the table some very valuable data assets that would otherwise remain hidden and untapped.

Registering an Amazon S3 location as a DataStore in Xplore

 

List of DataSets discovered on the Crawled DataStore

 

You have full control over which DataStores (or parts thereof) to register for discovery and crawling. There is also the option to tag DataStores if crawling is not required. For instance, a DataStore can be tagged to indicate that it has employee-sensitive information or ESG and Sustainability research data. Needless to say, security and encryption protocols are in place to safeguard your sensitive data when you register and crawl DataStores.

Stay tuned to find out more about other functionalities and features of Xplore in subsequent articles. Our next article will cover data classification and data inventory. In the meantime, if you would like to enquire about Xplore or request a product demo, please contact us. We would love to hear from you!