Cogniflare Introduces a Data Management and Catalog Platform for Google Cloud

Cogniflare introduced an integrated data management and catalog platform last week, promising to ease the management of vast volumes of data stored in multiple Google Cloud services.

According to Cogniflare CTO and cofounder Ahamed Khan, the Kyrah for Google Cloud data management tool provides IT teams with a process engine that allows them to handle data residing in, for example, the Google BigQuery data warehouse.

The Problem

As IT companies use Google cloud services, they end up with hundreds of programs that use a combination of Google services to store data. According to Khan, Kyrah for Google Cloud uses Google's application programming interfaces (APIs) to help centrally handle and upgrade all change requests made to certain services if a Kyrah for Google Cloud platform user makes a change. Furthermore, both of these modifications can be monitored using an Activity Log.

If the volume of data collected in the cloud continues to grow rapidly, companies are reaching the point where it becomes uncontrollable, according to Khan. “There has been a data explosion,” he said. “It looks like we're just getting started  to lose control.”

The Solution

According to Kahn, Kyrah for Google Cloud offers the same types of governance features that Microsoft introduced to Azure with the release of Microsoft Purview. According to Khan, Cogniflare intends to incorporate connectors that will expand Kyra's data storage scope into the various cloud services offered by Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS). The organization also intends to broaden Kyra's scope into on-premises IT environments that use, for example, the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) or the Apache Kafka event streaming platform for data sharing in near real-time.

Furthermore, Cognitive is working to provide Kyrah with AI capabilities to infuse the platform with machine learning algorithms that will make it simpler for compliance officers to detect anomalous actions. According to Kahn, this would be a key skill as compliance officers struggle to comply with privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Rule (GDPR).

Cogniflare created Kyrah to meet the data processing needs of its clients. Spoko, a lightweight identity and access management (IDAM) platform for Google Cloud, is also available from the developer.

The Cloud Era

Since computing space is now much more readily available, data storage has become a more urgent concern in the era of the cloud. In an on-premises IT environment, compute and storage space governed how much data an enterprise might capture and maintain. Since external infrastructure capabilities are made available on-demand under the limits of a subscription, cloud providers potentially enable an enterprise to collect, analyze, and store massive amounts of data. IT organizations, on the other hand, lack the resources necessary to handle and protect data at that size.

It remains unclear to what extent a full-fledged data management crisis has emerged. However, the pace at which organizations are now gathering data is rapidly outpacing their ability to handle the data efficiently. The difficulties — and opportunities — lie in designing and deploying systems that can add some balance to this chaos.

Google has not stated its intention to address the data storage problem. However, what a single cloud vendor does to fix an increasingly multi-platform problem might not be all that important in the end.