Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

June 2021

What is Customer Data Ingestion?

The verdict is in: The more you analyze your customer data, the better chance you have of outperforming your business rivals, attracting new prospects and providing excellent service. For example, a report by McKinsey & Company has good news for companies who are "intensive users of customer analytics:" Their chances of excelling at new customer acquisition and being highly profitable are 23 and 19 times more likely, respectively, than those of their competitors.

Pushing Data from a Data Warehouse to Salesforce

Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM (customer relationship management) software, with a 20 percent market share. The Salesforce CRM software is chock-full of features for business intelligence (BI) and analytics so that you can capture hidden insights and make smarter, data-driven decisions. The traditional ETL (extract, transform, load) process extracts data from one or more sources and then deposits it into a centralized data repository.

PII Pseudonymization is the New Normal

Businesses rely on personal data to better tailor their approach to customer relations and streamline a marketing strategy suited to their target audience. In today's business climate, holding onto the personally identifiable information (PII) of specific individuals for various marketing and customer services purposes requires secure storage and extraction. PII pseudonymization is the latest and greatest method for protecting personal data.

Secure PII Pseudonymization: How to Do It Right

With news of a devastating data breach constantly in the headlines, you need to take proactive steps to safeguard the personally identifiable information (PII) that your organization stores and processes. Along with techniques such as PII masking, PII pseudonymization is one of the most popular and practical ways to protect sensitive data. But what is PII pseudonymization, exactly, and how can you pseudonymize PII? We’ll answer these questions and more in this article.

5 Steps to Prevent PII Data Breaches

When it was revealed in September 2017, the massive Equifax data breach made international headlines. As one of the three major credit agencies in the United States, Equifax is responsible for processing personally identifiable information (PII) such as individuals’ names, addresses, and social security numbers. According to Equifax, 143 million people were affected by the data breach, making it one of the biggest cybersecurity disasters in history.

AWS Data Pipeline Best Practices

Knowing best practices for Amazon Web Services (AWS) data pipelines is essential for modern companies handling large datasets and requiring secure ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes. In this article, we discuss AWS data pipeline best practices to ensure top performance and streamlined processes — without complications that can impede the execution of data transfer.

Getting to Know the Apache Hadoop Technology Stack

With technology innovations raging at incredible speeds over the past few decades, new and exciting platforms for gathering, storing, transforming, and manipulating data are entering the market every day. Apache Hadoop was one of these disrupters when it entered the market in 2006, offering distributed storage and big data processing using a network of many computers.

The Ultimate Guide to HIPAA

The Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has been an important federal law in healthcare since 1996. Part of its purpose was to create standards meant to protect sensitive patient information, and it took on even more important once the digitalization of patient health records became widespread. Now it’s required for certain types of businesses to protect patient health information—or face fines that range from $100 to $50,000 per violation.

Data Privacy: Are You Making These Mistakes?

Organizations have access to massive amounts of data, but they don’t always give enough thought to how they’re going to keep it private and protected. Dozens of data privacy regulations are in effect or in development globally, and the average consumer is learning more about how much of their data gets collected and used by businesses. For this reason, companies need to focus on keeping data safe while it's under their control, but it’s easy to make mistakes.

Prescriptive Analytics

Data analytics technology helps organizations make sense of an ever-increasing volume of data. As this technology matures, it gets better at delivering actionable insights and helping companies determine outcomes. Prescriptive analytics is a modern solution that builds upon other analytics technology and guides organizations to the right decisions for a particular situation.

3 Reasons Extract, Load & Transform is a Bad Idea

Extract, Load, Transform (ELT) technology makes it easy for organizations to pull data from databases, applications, and other sources, and move it into a data lake. But companies pay for this convenience in many ways. ELT solutions can have a negative impact on data privacy, data quality, and data management.

Why User-Level Security Is Crucial for Business Intelligence

Picking the right business intelligence (BI) tool is essential to helping you beat your competitors, better serve your customers, and make smarter data-driven decisions. However, there's no one-size-fits-all tool for every enterprise. Not all BI users are created equal, and not all users should have the same level of access to sensitive and confidential data.

ETL with Apache Airflow

Written in Python, Apache Airflow is an open-source workflow manager used to develop, schedule, and monitor workflows. Created by Airbnb, Apache Airflow is now being widely adopted by many large companies, including Google and Slack. Being a workflow management framework, Apache Airflow differs from other frameworks in that it does not require exact parent-child relationships. Instead, you only need to define parents between data flows, automatically organizing them into a DAG (directed acyclic graph).

Should You Leave Your Company's PII Data Unprotected?

Personally identifiable information (PII) is some of the most valuable data that organizations can have. It's also some of the most dangerous if you don't follow data security best practices. If you don't treat this data with care, you could end up in the headlines as the victim of the latest data breach, costing you money and damaging your reputation. Of course, you should never leave PII data unprotected. So what is the best way to protect the confidential and sensitive PII that you handle?

PII Substitution: 4 Ways to Protect Your Sensitive Data

News of the latest massive data breach is always in the headlines. How can you avoid being next on the list? In order to function, businesses of all sizes and industries need to collect personally identifiable information (PII) about their employees and customers—but they also need to take proactive steps to keep this information secure and defend against PII breaches. PII substitution is an effective tactic to shield your sensitive and confidential data from prying eyes.

The Complete Guide to Student Data Privacy

Are you handling students' education records or personally identifiable information (PII)? If so, it's crucial that you're familiar with what student privacy laws such as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) have to say. In this article, we'll go over what educators and administrators need to know about FERPA and student data privacy.

Create a Salesforce ETL Pipeline in 30 Minutes

Salesforce is one of the world’s most popular CRM (customer relationship management) software platforms, helping businesses of all sizes and industries beat their competitors and better serve their clients. But instead of keeping your Salesforce data inside the CRM platform itself, you can make better use of this information by moving it into a target data warehouse.

Amazon Redshift Database Developer Guide

Amazon Redshift is one of the most prominent data warehousing leaders across companies of all industries and sizes, providing applications in analytics, reporting, business intelligence, etc. Using Amazon redshift will allow you to retrieve, compare, and evaluate large amounts of data in multiple-stage operations to deliver the desired outcome.

SOA vs. Microservices

Most individuals who work in technology — and in particular, cloud computing — are likely aware of how service-oriented architecture (SOA) and microservices work. There is much discussion, however, regarding the best approaches for various situations. There are crucial differences in data governance, component sharing, and the architecture between SOA vs. microservices. In this article, you'll learn the basics of SOA vs.

The Official 2021 Checklist for HIPAA Compliance

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) is a U.S. federal law. It sets national standards for health care providers to maintain the privacy of patients' protected health information (PHI), including electronically protected health information (ePHI). If you collect, store, or process any kind of patient or medical data, you need to be aware of HIPAA and how it affects your operations. But what does it really mean to be HIPAA compliant?

What is PII Masking and How Can You Use It?

Imposter fraud is the second-most common type of fraud reported to the Federal Trade Commission, with around one-fifth of all cases resulting in financial loss to the victim. This often occurs because of a failure on the part of organizations to protect personally identifiable information (PII). Fraud is only one type of attack that may occur. Phishing is another exceptionally common data security threat. It often results from crawlers collecting email addresses, one type of PII, on the open web.

A Guide to Data Privacy and Data Protection

Organizations collect and use personal data for a variety of purposes, often without considering the impact on data privacy. Individuals are increasingly more aware of how their data is being used and the lack of say they have over the process. Data privacy and protection regulations are in place around the world to protect consumers and stop their personal information from being misused.

6 Mistakes to Avoid When Handling PII

Personally identifiable information, or PII, is sensitive information that can identify an individual. Industry or data protection laws often regulate this type of data, requiring that organizations handle PII according to specific practices. It’s all too easy to make mistakes when working with PII, so we've highlighted six common scenarios to look out for.

BI Compliance: Can a Restructure Deliver Enhanced Data Privacy?

Every data-driven business is terrified of the prospect of a data breach. Exposing sensitive data could mean reputational damage, loss of clients, and heavy fines under emerging privacy laws. But every data-driven business also wants to make use of its data. Business intelligence (BI) platforms allow anyone to build complex and detailed dashboards that help them understand the organization’s current state. How do you resolve this tension? One approach is to build a privacy-first data structure.

ELT: Easy to Deploy, Easy to Outgrow

Extract, load, transform (ELT) technology is a type of data pipeline that ingests data from one or more sources, loads the data into its destination (typically a data lake), and then allows end-users to perform ad-hoc transformations on it as needed. ELT can perform mass extraction of all data types, including raw data, without the need to set up transformation rules and filters before data loading.

What Does Customer 360 Mean?

Collecting and analyzing data on your customers’ preferences and behavior is one of the best ways to improve your products and customer service. As your business grows, you need enterprise-class customer relationship management (CRM) software that can store and manage all of your customer data. Salesforce is a software as a service (SaaS) company that provides the Salesforce CRM software to more than 100,000 organizations worldwide.

PII Substitution May Be the Future of Data Privacy

Unfortunately, most of us have had our sensitive data or personal information compromised at one point or another. Whether the leaked data involves credit cards, a bank account number, a social security number, or an email address, nearly everyone has been a victim of a third-party data breach. In 2020, over 155 million people in the U.S. — nearly half the country's population — experienced unauthorized data exposure.

7 Data Migration Best Practices and Tools

Data migration seems simple from a high-level point of view. After all, you’re simply moving data between two or more locations. In practice, however, migrating data can be one of your IT department’s trickiest data management initiatives. According to LogicWorks, 90 percent of CIOs in charge of data migrations moving from on-premises to the cloud have encountered problems during this process, with 75 percent missing planned deadlines.

PII Data Privacy: How to Stay Compliant

When people share their personal information with an organization, they’re performing an act of trust. They trust you to keep their data safe from hackers, and they trust you to use their data only for legitimate purposes. While many organizations honor this trust, others do not. As a result, governments worldwide are rushing to pass data protection legislation that puts the power back in the hands of people.