"Data virtualisation brings agility to a business" | Charles Southwood, Denodo @ Tech Show London 2023

The EM360 team was at Tech Show London to interview business leaders and industry experts about everything Enterprise technology – from AI to cybersecurity to data.  

Yesterday we spoke to Charles Southwood, regional VP of Denodo, about the current trends shaping the way organisations handle, manage and protect their data. 

Data Virtualisation brings agility and security 

When asked about the benefits of data virtualisation within the enterprise, Mr Southwood explained that virtualising allows companies to better manage their data while also providing an extra layer of security to protect their assets. 

“The challenges that most organisations are facing now are really about managing the large volumes of data which continue to grow. It's also becoming more disparate because it's being spread across the cloud, on-premise software and service. 

Other challenges are that they have are the format of the data is becoming more disparate, Structured, unstructured and so on, and also the velocity of the data," Mr Southwood explained. 

“So Looking for a way of being able to combine the data in a very effective and agile manner is a big challenge for most organisations. Data virtualisation is a solution to that by allowing a logical or virtual layer to protect the users from all the complexities of the data underneath, while still giving them a single view of everything that's going on in the enterprise.”

“Virtualising gives you this common layer so that irrespective of the complexities of the different data formats underneath, you've got this consistent view bit like when you use Spotify you can see all the music even though. There's no music there, it's out somewhere else. And you get it when you want it. 

That's kind of what works with the data virtualisation there, so it facilitates the data mesh strategy, creates these data products there and then have Federated ownership in the domains so they can access and manage and control the data.”

AI is transforming data management and integration

When asked about the role of AI in data virtualisation and management as a whole, Mr Southwood said that the rapidly-evolving technology is changing the way organisations manage their data.

“We're seeing a lot of organisations that want to aggregate lots of disparate sources in order to get those AI insights. Of course, the more sources they can combine easily,  the better those insights. 

This virtualisation gives them the ability to access hundreds of different sources. Right from you know, IoT data, social media, geospatial data, but also structured data and other sources and feed that into AI algorithms to be able to learn and gain from those.  So it's a very important component of an AI strategy.”