For decades, the technologies and systems that deliver analytics have undergone massive change. What hasn’t changed, however, is the goal: using data-driven insights to drive actions. Insight to action has been a consistent vision for the industry. Everyone from data practitioners to technology developers have sought this elusive goal, but as Chief Data Strategy Officer Cindi Howson points out, it has remained unfulfilled — until now.

Enterprises using Microsoft Azure can now deliver secure, automated data pipelines while boosting compliance with privacy and industry mandates using Fivetran Business Critical.

Today we’re excited to announce the public beta launch of Continual, the first operational AI platform built specifically for modern data teams and the modern data stack. We’re also announcing our $4M Series Seed, led by Amplify Partners, and joined by Illuminate Ventures, Wayfinder, DCF, and Essence, as well as new partnerships with Snowflake and dbt Labs.

Data teams across companies have continuous challenges of consolidating data, processing it and making it useful. They deal with challenges such as a mixture of multiple ETL jobs, long ETL windows capacity-bound on-premise data warehouses and ever-increasing demands from users. They also need to make sure that the downstream requirements of ML, reporting and analytics are met with the data processing.

As we head into the holidays, there’s no better time to talk about bringing people together. And there’s no better way to bring employees together within a company aspiring to be data-driven than with a data literacy program. What data analytics processes should your organization put into place to increase data literacy? It all starts with establishing a training program to empower your people to work with data, regardless of their level of expertise.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) has been around since 2006. Most use this scalable, cloud-based service for archiving and backing up data. Within 10 years of its birth, S3 stored over 2 trillion objects, each up to 5 terabytes in size. Enterprises value their data as something worth preserving. But much of this data lies inert, in “cold” data lakes, unavailable for analysis. Also called “dark data”, it can hold key insights for enterprises.