Multiple Disparate Data Sources No Match for GetSmarter and Denodo Platform from AWS Marketplace

Even with the most carefully planned data strategy, accumulating disparate data is inevitable—if not in formal databases, then in the many business applications in use in your environment. Asking IT to clean and combine data sets for each new question takes time you don’t have.

If you can’t access and use disparate data effectively, how can you make good, data-driven decisions?

This was the question faced by GetSmarter, a company that collaborates with leading universities worldwide to offer short, online courses that help professionals acquire new skills and certifications to differentiate themselves in their fields. The company has been growing lately—fast—and while that is good news, GetSmarter was starting to feel concerned about the growing number of disparate repositories holding important company data.

“We knew that having disparate data repositories was going to complicate meeting data protection requirements, especially at scale,” says Schoeman Loubser, a GetSmarter information architect, who had his eye on the 2018 deadline for complying with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). “Our other major challenge was that we weren’t able to answer business questions from internal and external customers as quickly as we wanted.”

Instead of going with a data-warehousing solution—which can take months if not years to set up without ever achieving truly real-time decision-making support—GetSmarter went with Denodo Platform from AWS Marketplace.

Denodo connects to the disparate sources holding GetSmarter data and presents that data as a semantic layer, so business users can access, analyze, and report on it without knowing the first thing about the underlying systems. That translates to much faster turnaround times.

“Before the new solution, business users had to request specific reports, each of which needed about a week to develop,” says Loubser. “Denodo Platform from AWS Marketplace helps our business users answer questions with no IT involvement and zero development time.”

Another benefit: granular access controls are imposed at the virtual data layer provided by Denodo, so GetSmarter doesn’t need to devote resources to managing access at each data source. “That helps us keep our current customers satisfied as well as easily demonstrate to potential new customers that we conform to international standards,” says Loubser. As a result, he explains, “our compliance with GDPR and other data protection requirements is even stronger.”

For Loubser, Denodo Platform in AWS Marketplace is the cherry on top of the AWS cake. “We’re already committed to AWS for its reliability, its fast scalability, and the worldwide reach that helps us comply with certain countries’ requirement that data be stored locally,” he says. “Denodo is a great, user-friendly platform for any data professional, and being able to access it through AWS Marketplace makes AWS even better for us.”

Read the full case study on GetSmarter and Denodo Platform from AWS Marketplace.