1 Introduction
Delphix is a privately held software development company headquartered in Redwood City, California, USA. It was founded in 2008 with a vision of a dynamic platform for data operators and data consumers within an enterprise to collaborate in a fast, flexible and secure way. With offices across USA, Europe, Latin America and Asia, Delphix is currently serving over 300 global enterprise customers including 30% of the Fortune 100 companies.
To stay competitive during the times of digital transformation, when business models and technology landscapes change daily, enterprises must constantly reinvent many of their business processes to achieve new levels of agility and flexibility. Cloud computing has freed them from expenses and administration efforts of running their own IT infrastructures; mobile and IoT devices has given their employees unprecedented reach to the farthest corners of the world; DevOps practices has dramatically improved the speed and agility of software development.
However, these developments have also dramatically increased the amounts of information companies have to collect, store and process as a part of their daily business processes. Unfortunately, as opposed to computing resources, data is much more difficult to maintain and even more difficult to safeguard, since traditionally enterprise data is stored in a variety of structured and unstructured formats spread across multiple silos on different platforms powered by different technology stacks. The number and size of these silos continues to grow exponentially. Increasingly, these silos are migrating to the cloud, where administrators lose the ability to maintain control over them, while still retaining the responsibility for ensuring availability, integrity and confidentiality of the sensitive data. The recently introduced harsh compliance regulations like GDPR have significantly increased the cost of a data breach involving personal data.
All these challenges introduce a significant amount of friction, both organizational and technological, between various parties within enterprises, that expect any data exchange to be fast, smooth and secure to support such tasks as data analytics, development and quality assurance or cloud migration. Unfortunately, whereas application developers have already embraced the agile DevOps practices for years, similar methodologies for reducing data friction are only starting to gain widespread acceptance. The notion of DataOps as a methodology for lean and agile data analytics first appeared just a few years ago, but nowadays its principles and values, as well as corresponding software tools, are being applied for rapid, automated and secure management of data for various intents and purposes.
Delphix’s answer to all these challenges is the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform – an integrated platform for data virtualization, managing and securing data across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments. With the help of the platform, companies can quickly create virtualized data sources that make existing data silos instantly available across environments for consumption by data scientists, developers or testers, while at the same time ensuring that sensitive information is masked according to corporate security and compliance policies and that any access to the data is fully monitored and audited. Aligned with the DataOps methodology, Delphix Dynamic Data Platform unlocks a broad range of use cases – from disaster recovery and cloud migration to agile software development and lean data analytics.
