Axa XL is a subsidiary of the global insurance and reinsurance company Axa and is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut. They have more than 100 offices across six continents. In this post, I’d like to share Axa XL’s experience with the Denodo Platform.
No Single Version of the Truth
Axa XL wanted to build a semantic layer that could provide them with a consolidated view of their enterprise data, while reducing replication. To meet compliance requirements, Axa XL also needed a governed data environment that could enable intercompany data transfers with a complete understanding of the data lineage, from source to destination. They had a complex and diverse data landscape and different business groups used their own BI tools to access data.
Axa XL had been relying on extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes to integrate the data, but this lead to excessive replication. This, in turn, lead to latencies in data delivery as well as inconsistencies between different data sets, creating multiple versions of the truth. As a result, outdated or unreliable figures were reported to stakeholders. Axa XL also lacked data access control, as they had no way to trace who accessed what data, or when. Without role-based access rules, anyone could access any data, regardless of whether or not they had the authority. This made the entire data management architecture extremely vulnerable to security breaches.
Data Virtualization in the Cloud
Axa XL consolidated their enterprise data, which they had stored in multiple policy management systems, into a platform that they called the Data Ecosystem and Engagement Platform (DEEP), and they hosted this platform on Azure. The Denodo Platform for Azure served as a business translation layer in this cloud architecture. It acted as a single semantic layer between all the consuming apps on one side, and all the data sources on the other. The Denodo Platform enabled Axa XL to establish central data access, data governance, and security policies across their data infrastructure, and this facilitated the central control of data governance and security.
A Consolidated and Governed Data Landscape
The Denodo Platform acts as the single point of entry to all of Axa XL’s different systems, eliminating the need for each consuming application to connect to the sources individually, and making the entire data architecture extremely nimble. This also greatly reduced Axa XL’s need to replicate data, and it made the data available to business teams in a faster way, vastly improving their business agility.
To learn more about how companies are leveraging data virtualization across numerous industries, see the collection of Denodo case studies.
Originally published at https://www.datavirtualizationblog.com on October 7, 2020.
