This week Cloudera hosted its APAC-specific event, EVOLVE24, inviting partners, customers and stakeholders from the region to hear more about how they can advance their use of data, analytics and AI with Cloudera.
In the midst of many announcements, where Cloudera showcased its technical prowess in a world demanding hybrid solutions, a prominent release was the additions to its metadata management solutions.
Bringing metadata management to ANZ
The two new updates to Cloudera's metadata management are aimed at improving open interoperability, and address growing demands for security and governance throughout the data lifecycle.
Research indicates that more than half of organisations in Australia and New Zealand are planning to implement generative AI (GenAI) solutions within the year. Effective metadata management is crucial for ensuring data quality that either powers or cripples these solutions.
"Australian organisations dealing with complex data sets need that extra layer of metadata management to ensure data accuracy, integrity, and consistency," said Vini Cardoso, Chief Technology Officer for Cloudera Australia and New Zealand. "This is not just for better decision-making but also as a safeguard against data breaches and non-compliance."
He added that the enhancements provide a robust ethical data governance and security framework for customers in highly regulated industries such as the public sector, financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications.
Enhancements to modernise data management
The first addition involves the integration of Cloudera's Iceberg REST Catalog, allowing seamless access to Apache Iceberg tables using third-party engines. It facilitates leveraging various tools while maintaining unified security and governance, thereby simplifying data access and preserving data permissions and lineage across platforms. According to Cloudera, this reduces both the cost and risk of data breaches by minimising the number of separate security layers.
Secondly, Cloudera's Shared Data Experience (SDX) is now available in technical preview as a cloud-native, containerised experience. It offers end-to-end unified data security, governance, and metadata management, enhanced for greater elasticity, scale, and performance. The SDX facilitates self-service data access across tools and supports single-pane-of-glass management across both cloud and on-premises data. This aims to further minimise breach risks by consolidating security functions.
Protecting the moat of corporate data
Cloudera highlighted that these updates are designed to not only protect data with security and lineage throughout its lifecycle but also boost performance, scalability, and resiliency while reducing the total cost of ownership by optimising metadata management. Importantly, these additions enable metadata sharing without creating copies, promoting innovation with third-party tools without vendor lock-in.
"There is no moat bigger than your corporate data. Organisations are asking for a unified way to access and govern every data asset - structured and unstructured, in every location - on-premises and multi-cloud, and at every velocity - batch or streaming," said industry analyst Sanjeev Mohan. He pointed out that an enhanced data catalog incorporating formats like Iceberg REST APIs enables fine-grained access control.
Dipto Chakravarty, Chief Product Officer at Cloudera, noted that unified data and interoperability remain central to Cloudera's open data lakehouse architecture across hybrid clouds. "Our platform delivers unmatched scalability, performance, resilience, and cost-efficiency for managing expanding metadata, without vendor lock-in or data silos. By adhering to open standards, we ensure seamless integration and interoperability across any ecosystem so enterprises can make the most of their AI investments," said Chakravarty.
Making tracks in ANZ and beyond with Cloudera
In addition to solution announcements, the EVOLVE 24 APAC conference featured the Cloudera Data Impact Awards, where outstanding data-driven projects within organisations across industries were recognised. Categories included AI Acceleration, Cloud (Native) Innovation, Modernised Architectures & Pipelines, Leadership & Transformation, and People & Society.
The Australian Federal Police Force were the proud winners of the ANZ award, showcasing what's possible for digital transformation in the public sector. The winners of the broader APAC region included both public and private organisations from a wide variety of industries, showcasing the widespread impact of data, analytics and AI solutions.
Recognising the significance of the EVOLVE24 event, Charles Sansbury, CEO of Cloudera, remarked that it was an opportunity for organisations to collaborate and network with experts across the core areas of data, analytics, and AI. "By turning EVOLVE24 into a multi-day global conference, Cloudera is bringing the power of our platform and our community directly to our customers," he said.
