Stonebranch Online 2021: Week 2 Highlights

Paulin, Katie

Blog Post Stonebranch Online 2021: Week 2 Highlights

See what happened in this week’s virtual educational forum, and get a sneak peek at week three.

Week two of Stonebranch Online 2021 offered two webinars: one on orchestrating data pipelines and the other on multi-cloud environments. Both sessions featured product demonstrations of the Stonebranch Universal Automation Center (UAC) in action. Keep reading to learn more.

Orchestrate the Flow of Data Across Your Big Data Pipeline

Scott Davis, VP of Global Marketing at Stonebranch, provided an overview of modern data pipelines and addressed the challenges that data teams face when orchestrating the automated processes that keep them running. He started by describing the data pipeline stages and identified many of the applications and tools available within each stage. There are many.

But it’s not much of a pipeline if your data can’t easily flow from one tool to the next — you need to connect them. Well over half of the attendees indicated that they use a mix of point-to-point integrations and custom scripts to do just that. Nearly as many also confirmed that they’re constantly changing their tools. One-off integrations in an ever-changing landscape of tools? It’s easy to see why there’s so much instability and turmoil in many enterprise data pipelines.

Stonebranch Online 2021: week 2, Scott Davis quote: "Orchestrate the universe. That's what we believe. We want to orchestrate everything, and that means we have to tap into everything."

Moritz Roos, Director of Solution Engineering EMEA for Stonebranch, joined the session to demonstrate what a properly orchestrated data pipeline looks like within the Universal Automation Center. In his example, he walked through a live data orchestration workflow, which included:

Data Sources – both cloud and on-premises applications
Data Integration and Ingestion – Informatica
Data Store – Azure blob, Snowflake, AWS S3
Delivery – Tableau

While these tools only represent a few of the most common ones used by Stonebranch customers, the UAC can similarly integrate and automate any tool in your data pipeline.

Stonebranch Online 2021: week 2, Moritz Roos quote: "There are two ways we visualize a data pipeline. One is the data flow from your sources all the way to your presentation layer. The other is the control flow, or orchestration flow."

Watch On-Demand

Master Your Hybrid IT Environment in a Multi-Cloud World

Dr. Roland Kunz, Field CTO DCS Emerging Technologies for Dell Technologies, provided his thoughts on the multi-cloud world. He made it clear that it’s more important to be cloud-smart than cloud-first.

The hybrid cloud (public and private) is here to stay. Additionally, Dr. Kunz illustrated how enterprises are not tethered to a single cloud service provider. In fact, a multi-cloud strategy boosts agility with choice, flexibility, and predictability. To prepare your IT organization for what’s next, Dr. Kunz recommends that cloud operating models be optimized for speed and simplicity.

Stonebranch Online 2021: week 2, Dr Roland Kunz quote: The cloud is really not a destination. It's not a somewhere. It's an operating model."

Nils Buer, Director of Product Management for Stonebranch, explained the role of automation and orchestration in a successful hybrid IT environment.

More than half of attendees indicated that they’re using two to three public cloud providers, yet fewer than half are streaming data across their cloud providers. Using the UAC, Nils demonstrated how to stream data between cloud service providers (as well as cloud-based applications) automatically. The demonstration illustrated examples from Amazon S3 to Azure blob storage, then Microsoft Azure to SharePoint, and then SharePoint to PowerBI.

Stonebranch Online 2021: week 2, Nils Buer quote: "The UAC can transfer file between any public or private cloud provider. It's done in a streaming mode, so no intermediate storage is needed. You can also transfer data between any cloud-based applications in the same way."

Watch On-Demand

What’s Next

Browse the Stonebranch Online 2021 event overview page to access session recordings on-demand for DataOps, DevOps, multi-cloud environments, and more.