Thomas, Staff Data Governance Engineer: LogMeIn provides a portfolio of cloud-based service offerings, which help individuals and businesses connect to their workplace, colleagues, and customers. There are a lot of mergers and acquisitions at LogMeIn so there is a lot of work around integrating different data environments. In our toolbox today, we consider ourselves an Amazon shop with Hadoop as our data warehouse and we use Hive and Presto. We also use Tableau as our BI tool and have built our own homegrown ETL tool.
Thomas: We are trying to kick-off data standardization for data governance to include table structures and column types. We are focused on pushing the envelope for self-service, so making sure data is standardized so that all users speak the same language regardless of where they sit, is important to us.
Thomas: Alation is used as the GUI frontend of their data warehouse. It provides an easy to use, central place for people to find data, and we can apply any type of metadata information into Alation. Alation allows users to save and search for queries which saves a lot of time. Before Alation, a data scientist would have to go to many different sources (MySQL, Oracle, Amazon) and merge tables to do any sort of analysis or modeling. With Alation, the data is brought to users so the time for doing a query is down from one week to two days.
From a governance perspective, Alation is used for our GDPR practice. Through Alation, we can tag at both table and column levels to identify GDPR related data objects: We’re able to assign roles to the table level that determines who has access to that data, display the owner of tables, describe how we are protecting data, and utilize protection flags and tags to identify GDPR related data objects. Alation allows us to describe how we are protecting data.
At LogMeIn, Alation is enabling us to:
Thomas: Alation saves our users a lot of time and provides a searchable central place for users to find data. Alation also allows us to share queries that have already been written and makes sure the data is readily consumable and reusable for the data team to leverage one another’s knowledge and continuously find ways for our company to grow.