Announcing IBM Data Virtualization as a Service, fully managed on the IBM Cloud.

Data movement and preparation take up to 70-80% of your team’s time [1], consuming resources and often making data access challenging and costly. Many organizations use various methods of copying data for users across their enterprises. This can cause compliance risks, versioning issues, stale data and delays in projects through excess wait times and storage resource allocation. 

Data virtualization helps break down your data silos, removing the need for duplication and data movement so you can access data at the source. With IBM Data Virtualization, you can simplify and democratize your data landscape to get trusted, governed data into the hands of your data scientists, developers and engineers more quickly than traditional ETL processes. Now fully managed on the IBM Cloud as part of IBM Cloud Pak® for Data as a Service, the solution cuts down the hassle of data management and scaling so your teams can focus on what they do best. Connect disparate data sources in a unified view to integrate with internal and external business intelligence (BI) and machine learning tools and reduce ETL requests by 25-65%. [2]

Share data across the organization in near real-time

Achieve increased data accuracy with near real-time access to data across your organization. Data virtualization helps create an enterprise-wide collaborative data environment, allowing users to share data with their team, without the need to find, move and duplicate data. It no longer matters where your data is stored; data virtualization makes it simple to access and use that data responsibly.

Easily address dynamic changes in your data environments

Your data landscape is constantly changing — different databases, different formats, different clouds. Support business agility with data virtualization. Even with changing schemas in underlying data sources, your end applications can function transparently with the data abstraction layer provided through virtualization.

Accelerate data management and AI initiatives

By quickly getting your data virtualization instance started and setting up multiple data sources in one go, you can integrate and make data available for analytics and machine learning activities. Empower your business users to not only find the data they need, but also use the trusted data for AI with highly available and governed access to all of your connected sources in near real-time.

Consume less resources 

Data virtualization saves storage, reducing the time and costs associated with moving or copying data. With an as-a-Service delivery, you can spend time on driving results instead of management, provisioning and support.

Improve the quality of trusted data

As part of a complete data and AI platform, Data Virtualization for IBM Cloud Pak for Data has deep integration with different data warehouses, governance solutions, privacy tools and model management. Build one language for business users across your organization with a single  business glossary through IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog. This unified language helps reduce complexity and creates the standardization needed to quickly create and iterate on application, AI and machine learning projects. When that governed, cataloged data is then virtualized, easily apply compliance and automation tools to meet regulatory requirements.

Connect the data you have to the tools you already use

At data virtualization’s core is no data movement, whether your data is on-premises, on your private cloud or in a public one. Connect with your existing databases — like Db2 on Cloud, Netezza on Cloud, or Snowflake — and easily virtualize to make the data available to your BI tools like Tableau, Looker and Cognos. With advanced multi-source filtering, ensure that only the minimum volume of data needs to be read. Not fully on cloud? Keep your data where you want it, with IBM Cloud Satellite connections to your on-prem sources to achieve better flexibility and resiliency.

Next steps

Now fully managed, IBM Data Virtualization as a Service can help meet your organization’s needs for fast, accurate data to accelerate AI and machine learning projects.

Learn more about how IBM Data Virtualization helps to eliminate data siloes at our website.

[1] IDC. Worldwide Global DataSphere 2020 Forecast

[2] Forrester. New Technology: The Projected Total Economic Impact™ Of IBM Cloud Pak For Data.