“Our platform provides safe measures to be able to extract insights about what data you have, linking the Business terminology to Technical teams to have everyone ‘speaking the same language’ and allow the quality of your data to be traceable, all while complying with any regulation you overlay on top of it”

It seems like we can never get enough of new technology, especially as it applies to the world of business. New technology emerges alongside new ways to conduct work, promising to change the scope and process of business, but as Rom Linhares, Director for North American services at Elait, says, “It’s technology that has failed business.”

In the past, there has been a failure to apply technology to key processes effectively. The world of data governance is no different. As a company, chances are you’re using a number of different vendors for all sorts of reasons. “At the end of the day what happens with these tools? Processes fail, they’re not adequately applied,” Linhares says. “When implementing a data governance program, people come in with their eyes wide shut. They don’t really understand how the technology will be implemented, and what’s at stake, and that’s a key problem that needs to be addressed. An additional aspect that organizations fail to address is the use of the tools by all parts of the organization and how do you continue to train all team members to ensure usage.”

Elait is a technology services company that delivers integrated data management solutions which leverages leading-edge technologies, technical expertise and proven process and procedural adherance. Elait seeks not only to remedy these fundamental gaps in applying technology and methodology to business problems, but also to revolutionize how data is managed and utilized as well as how data governance programs can be run concisely and non-intrusively as possible on Elait’s leading platform. “We’ve built a platform that combines Gartner Magic Quadrant technical infrastructure with methodology and proven frameworks,” Linhares says. What this also means is that the Elait data management platform acts like an interface, completely overlaying a company's entire processes. It’s versatile, agnostic, and scalable. “Our platform is able to scale to handle hundreds of thousands of data assets. We can go from ingesting a few simple pipelines to thousands of very complex ones. We use the infrastructure to actually scale up and scale down as needed. It depends on the client and how many data sources they have. It could be forty, it could be forty-thousand. It doesn't matter. We’re going to be interjecting that on the interface, so we can scale up or scale down as needed,” Linhares explains.

In terms of data governance compliance, Linhares stresses the importance of having a system that accounts for all regulatory needs, and he notes that most of these differ from state to state, country to country. “They're all different. How do you actually manage that? So for the client, we ask ourselves, what rule is applied to them? What the Elait Data Management Platform does is it builds the context around the data,” Linhares explains.

Data governance is, by definition, extremely complex. Legal requirements as well as compliance standards are varied, sometimes ambiguous, and constantly changing. “If you fail on some of these requirements, you’re going to be dinged. There are obviously regulations that you follow but it goes beyond that to: how do I actually implement policies that allow people to access the data?” Linhares says.

This sentiment speaks to the type of challenges professionals face when trying to apply and understand data governance techniques. Namely, data governance is believed to be a one-and-done solution, when really it requires further speculation, integration, and understanding. Being able to understand and look at the data means looking at it from all different points of view to be able to grasp the opportunities within it – who's the service provider? What’s a client? Who’s the customer? “Most companies implement a data governance program and they let it just take off and nobody uses it, right? Instead, we want to build something holistic that interfaces to and monitors the entire all processes and procedures, examining transactional business, monitoring data sets in real-time or near real-time because these change all the time. We can monitor every second if the need arises. There is always going to be a benefit that will need to be balanced with costs and technology limitations,” Linhares explains.

Part of Elait’s approach has been to utilize the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning but in a highly scalable way. “The analysis [of data] is very fast and very thorough. We look at these patterns and start building this repository of knowledge around the data and start sharing that information so people can utilize it, in essence giving users access to a central ‘Marketplace’ of the most used and beneficial sets of data,” Linhares says.

What makes the Elait Platform completely different from other tools is its ability to scale and to go beyond the mere act of providing data. Rather, it’s about helping companies infer knowledge around the data. Continually monitoring the data also allows for alerts to be sent if something is changing, which gives people the ability to respond to it. “What we want is to reduce risk, manage policies, and be able to infer from the data by looking at existing policies. We need to manage the existing policies companies have too, because they might be running many different tools that are collecting data constantly as well. Our platform provides safe measures to be able to extract data while complying with any regulation you overlay on top of it,” Linhares explains.

Creating an actionable catalog of data is paramount for companies to be able to understand their operations and build. Elait automates these processes for companies, creating an ease-of-use system that gives a holistic repository where information can be stored and transformed into knowledge.

But Elait is also more than a data governance service provider. As a data management platform, Elait remains agile enough to respond to a rapidly changing landscape. Linhares views change in a way that speaks to a cultural shift occurring, getting rid of the old paradigms and ushering forth a new era of ownership. “Most people aren’t data literate. So, these responsibilities are being passed down to them, but they have no idea how to handle it. Monitoring the knowledge sharing between the platforms and users is key. Elait helps with creating that centralized repository where workable knowledge is actually contained. Now I can get use out of that data,” Linhares says.