The Enterprise Data and Business Intelligence (EDBI) team has acquired two new technologies to support the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and Data Management at Rice. The addition of the Snowflake Data Cloud and Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud platforms will boost the transformation of Rice’s Data Warehouse and Data Governance program. Both technologies are agnostic of any system or application, which makes the possibilities limitless for enterprise data management at Rice.
The Snowflake Data Cloud platform is a fully managed SaaS that will host Rice’s data warehouse, data lake, and associated data marts. The implementation of Snowflake aligns Rice with several of our peer institutions that also use Snowflake for their data cloud solution. It supports big data, semi-structured data, unstructured data, and structured data. This elastic data platform optimizes and stores data in a columnar format, which improves query performance. The time travel feature will allow for on-demand, instant snapshots that are often requested by our consumers. Curated data sets will allow EDBI to “bundle” data assets for departmental use and sandboxes. Data masking will provide a greater level of data security. This feature is critical when we use temporary workers for projects with FERPA, PII, HIPAA, or other security-regulated data.
Informatica’s Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) is a Gartner leader in Enterprise Integration PaaS, Data Integration, Data Quality, and Master Data Management. These are essential disciplines in Rice’s enterprise data warehouse framework. IDMC is a fully robust AI-powered data management platform. The addition of Informatica will provide data integration, data governance, data lineage, master data management, metadata management, data quality, data masking, mass ingestion, integration hub, and many more capabilities to the EDBI ecosystem. The "low code/no code" feature of IDMC's data integration service will significantly reduce the time to market for EDW integration projects.
Snowflake and Informatica technology implementation project will go-live in mid November. The EDBI team and stakeholders are excited about “The New World” on our data horizon. Please stay tuned for more updates as we further advance Rice to a data-driven culture.