BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE,BIG DATA MANAGEMENT
Alation | September 23, 2022
Alation Inc., the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions, today announced a strategic partnership with Fivetran, the global leader in modern data integration, that enables joint customers to find and understand the full context of their data in the modern data stack. The partnership, powered by the new Fivetran Metadata API, unifies governed, trusted data from sources across an organization in one single view. As a result, data visibility increases and drives higher-quality data pipelines and better decision-making.
Alation and Fivetran are key elements of the modern data stack and support numerous joint customers, including Cimpress, Cisco, DocuSign, Genius Sports, Nielsen, Procore, Salesforce, and Slice. The strategic partnership provides shared customers with visibility into enterprise data as it moves through Fivetran-managed pipelines. Fivetran enables data and analytics teams to securely and easily move data from operational systems to analytics platforms. Alation enhances visibility into the data to speed pipeline development, ensuring users understand the wealth of information available and can derive insights from it. Together, the partnership merges data governance and data intelligence capabilities, improving data pipeline creation and informing business decisions.
“Alation is foundational for driving digital transformation. Our platform enables data and analytics teams to capture and understand the full breadth of their data, resulting in improved operational efficiencies and delivering more value to customers. “The partnership with Fivetran enhances Alation’s lineage graph, providing deep insight into data pipelines spanning operational data stores, data lakes and warehouses, and business intelligence tools. Now, users can easily unlock reliable and relevant data while also allowing teams to understand what data is available in the pipeline.”
Raj Gossain, Chief Product Officer at Alation
This partnership is driven by the need to enable users across an organization to find and use trusted, governed data to make informed, data-driven decisions. The modern enterprise relies on data intelligence and data integration solutions to provide access to valuable insights that feed critical business outcomes. Alation and Fivetran’s partnership simplifies data consolidation and pipeline creation, while aggregating governed, reliable data so organizations can get the most value from their data.
“Fivetran and Alation together enhance an organization’s visibility and effectiveness of data,” said Meera Viswanathan, Sr. Product Manager for Fivetran’s data governance capabilities. “Users of both solutions can accelerate data movement with a single pane view of data governance. Jointly, Fivetran and Alation ensure end users of data have high-quality and trusted data to drive decision-making.”
About Alation
Alation is the leader in enterprise data intelligence solutions including data search & discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation. Alation’s initial offering dominates the data catalog market. Thanks to its powerful Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces, Alation combines machine learning with human insight to successfully tackle even the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management. More than 400 enterprises drive data culture, improve decision making, and realize business outcomes with Alation including AbbVie, Allianz Global Investors, American Family Insurance, Autozone, Cisco, Draft Kings, Exelon, Fifth Third Bank, Finnair, General Mills, Munich Re, NASDAQ, Parexel, Pfizer, Salesforce, Virgin Australia, and Vistaprint. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Alation has been named to Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces list three times and is a 2022 UK’s Best Workplaces™ for Women. The company is backed by leading venture capitalists including Blackstone, Costanoa, Data Collective, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Icon, ISAI Cap, Riverwood, Salesforce, Sanabil, Sapphire, and Snowflake Ventures.
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BIG DATA MANAGEMENT,DATA SCIENCE
Cloudflare | September 22, 2022
Cloudflare, Inc., the security, performance, and reliability company helping to build a better Internet, today announced that Cloudflare’s Data Localization Suite (DLS) is now available in three new countries in the Asia Pacific region: Australia, India, and Japan. The Data Localization Suite will help businesses based in these countries, as well as global companies who do business in these countries, to comply with their data localization obligations by using Cloudflare to easily set rules and controls on where their domestic data goes and who has access to it. This ultimately allows any business with customers in these countries to service their data locally while benefiting from the speed, security, and scalability of Cloudflare’s global network.
Nearly 70% of countries in Asia have passed or drafted new data protection and privacy legislation. This often makes it difficult for regional companies to use foreign-based vendors to handle domestic traffic. Without regional support, many businesses are under pressure to use only in-country run vendors and may be required to restrict their application to one data center or one cloud provider’s region. This creates a trade-off between compliance and fast, secure experiences for end users. With the Data Localization Suite, businesses of any size or industry can now use Cloudflare to get more choice and control over how to meet their data locality needs, without sacrificing security or performance.
“No business should have to choose between compliance with local data regulation and a superior experience for their customers. And yet, we hear time and again that companies are forced to do so in the face of a complex and ever-changing landscape of regional legislation,” said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO, Cloudflare. "By expanding our Data Localization Suite to our customers in Australia, India, and Japan, we're ensuring data locality doesn't have to come at the expense of the speed, security, and privacy users expect and deserve online."
Now, businesses in Australia, India, and Japan can use Cloudflare’s Data Localization Suite to:
Control where traffic is serviced: Companies can choose the data center locations where their traffic is inspected. Businesses can also use Cloudflare’s Geo Key Manager to choose where private keys are held.
Build and deploy serverless code, with regional control: Build applications that allow developers to combine global performance with local compliance regulations. Jurisdiction Restrictions for Workers Durable Objects makes it easy to build serverless applications that are confined to a specific region.
Use Cloudflare’s security features to protect their web properties: Customers can use WAF, Bot Management, DDoS protection and more to ensure their websites are safe and stay online.
Align with global and regional security certifications: Businesses can trust that they are compliant with global privacy and security certifications like ISO 27001, 27701, and 27018 while still offering performance and speed at scale.
“Asia Pacific has over 2.5 billion Internet users, representing more than half of the total Internet users in the world, and data protection and privacy have become increasingly important in this region. Preserving end-user privacy is core to Cloudflare’s mission of helping to build a better Internet, and we look forward to working with businesses across Australia, India, and Japan to enable them to provide fast, private, reliable, and secure services to their end-users.”
Jonathon Dixon, VP and Managing Director, Asia Pacific, Japan, and China, Cloudflare
Data Localization Suite has supported Cloudflare customers in alignment with European localization requirements and regulations since 2020.
“We're thrilled to extend Cloudflare's localization benefits to our customers providing them greater control as they manage international data transfer requirements,” said Blake Brannon, Chief Strategy Officer, OneTrust. “Our partnership with Cloudflare supports our mission to empower our customers to navigate the evolving regulatory landscape with ease.”
Today, Cloudflare’s global network spans more than 275 cities in over 100 countries including more than 100 points of presence across Asia Pacific to bring its security, performance, and reliability solutions to as close to its regional customers as possible. Cloudflare continues to invest in the region, with offices in Beijing, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. In March, Cloudflare also announced 18 new cities added to their global network, including Bhubaneshwar, India; Fukuoka, Japan; Kanpur, India; and Naha, Japan.
About Cloudflare
Cloudflare, Inc. is on a mission to help build a better Internet. Cloudflare’s suite of products protect and accelerate any Internet application online without adding hardware, installing software, or changing a line of code. Internet properties powered by Cloudflare have all web traffic routed through its intelligent global network, which gets smarter with every request. As a result, they see significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks. Cloudflare was named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top Company Cultures 2018 list and ranked among the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company in 2019. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Cloudflare has offices in Austin, TX, Champaign, IL, New York, NY, San Jose, CA, Seattle, WA, Washington, D.C., Toronto, Lisbon, London, Munich, Paris, Beijing, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.
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BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE,BIG DATA MANAGEMENT,DATA SCIENCE
ACA Group | September 26, 2022
ACA Group (ACA), the leading governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) advisor in financial services, today announced that it has acquired Ethos ESG (Ethos), a provider of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings data and software for financial advisors, asset managers, institutions, and investors.
This acquisition marks ACA’s first analytics offering, which will be paired with ACA’s ESG experts to form an integrated tech and advisory offering under the ESG Advisory practice. ACA’s existing ESG Advisory practice supports with a range of programmatic needs for firms that integrate ESG into their business or investment activities. This currently includes advice and implementation support around strategy, policies/procedures, regulations and frameworks, training, and external reporting, among other areas. With Ethos, ACA’s clients will now also be able to easily analyze investments and automate several elements of ESG reporting.
Founded in 2019, Ethos offers an interactive platform that allows for the evaluation of over 350,000 impact ratings including companies, stocks, and funds through a prism of 45 ESG causes such as climate change, racial justice, mental health and more. Providing full transparency into how each impact score is calculated and the ability to upload portfolios and create models, Ethos allows for GRC professionals to understand the ESG characteristics of their investments and make responsible decisions that align with their firm's values and ESG commitments.
Ethos uses a proprietary set of approximately 100 underlying databases to generate its ratings. These databases provide a unique impact view of ratings, as well as provide insight into key metrics where available. The databases are fully transparent, so clients can see which underlying database source for each data point. Ethos also has capabilities developed to quickly scrape the public domain for material publicly available information to include in the ratings. These state-of-the-art capabilities allow Ethos to quickly add company coverage to help clients achieve full coverage of their investment portfolio.
Ethos has invested in innovation through the recent launch of its Impact Calculator, an embeddable widget that takes a dollar amount and immediately calculates the real-world equivalent impact of investing that amount in a specific fund or other product, compared to a benchmark.
Additionally, Ethos recently introduced its Carbon Neutral Certification program for mutual funds and ETFs, developed in conjunction with Change Finance. Through the certification, Ethos performs an independent analysis of a funds carbon footprint (covering Scope 1 and Scope 2 emission) and carbon credits (offsets) to verify whether the fund is carbon neutral during a specified period.
“This is an exciting step in helping to grow our presence in the ESG space and is ACA Group’s first foray into analytics as a service,” said Shvetank Shah, CEO of ACA Group. “We are invigorated to be building out and launching our data capabilities, starting with Ethos ESG. Combining data with our scalable solutions will continue to empower our clients to reimagine GRC and protect and grow their business.”
“We are thrilled to partner with ACA Group, as their brand and reach in the GRC space is well-known. “Not only is taking into consideration the ESG impact of your decisions right on its merits, but greater transparency into ESG issues helps firms mitigate risk and make informed choices while growing sustainably.”
Luke Wilcox, Founder and CEO of Ethos ESG
“This pairing will help us to leverage data in a new way to help firms of all sizes develop and monitor their ESG programs to mitigate risk, make informed choices, combat greenwashing, and grow profitably and sustainably in the process. Access to high-quality, transparent ESG data is an essential part of any ESG endeavor, and our partnership with Ethos will allow us to build and protect our clients’ ESG strategies in ways few others can,” said Dan Mistler, Head of ESG Advisory at ACA Group.
About ACA Group
ACA Group (ACA) is the leading governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) advisor in financial services. We empower our clients to reimagine GRC and protect and grow their business. Our innovative approach integrates advisory, managed services, distribution solutions, and analytics with our ComplianceAlpha® technology platform with the specialized expertise of former regulators and practitioners and our deep understanding of the global regulatory landscape.
About Ethos ESG
Founded in 2019, Ethos ESG provides data and analytics for financial advisors, asset managers, institutions, and investors. With over 350,000 impact ratings of stocks and funds across 45 causes, Ethos ESG helps firms offer robust impact reporting, monitor and address sustainability risks, and enhance quantitative research and modelling with transparent ESG data.
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