Solix Cloud Management

SOLIXCloud is a cloud data management platform from Solix Technologies that provides four primary solutions: Enterprise Archiving, Enterprise Data Lake, Consumer Data Privacy, and Enterprise Content Services. The platform is heavily based on (and built on top of) Solix CDP (or Common Data Platform), and the two share a similar structure and architecture. In SOLIXCloud’s case, this architecture is displayed in Figure 1. Note that, as shown in the diagram, SOLIXCloud is available across the major cloud providers of Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, as well as IBM’s and Oracle’s cloud services.

Fig 01 – SOLIXCloud architecture

As you would expect from a cloud data management platform, SOLIXCloud is scalable and fully managed. It uses a pay-as-you-go cost model, and it can handle a wide range of data types, including structured and unstructured data. It is a unified and internally integrated platform, providing many of the features and advantages offered by Solix CDP in a cloud-native solution.

Of the four solutions provided within SOLIXCloud, Enterprise Archiving is perhaps the most self-explanatory, offering a range of in-cloud data archival and application retirement features. Enterprise Data Lake enables the creation of a curated, centrally managed, “federated” data lake that in turn enables the centralised creation and orchestration of geographically or departmentally distributed data fabrics. Enterprise Content Services offers a centralised, automated, and API-driven cloud platform for enabling a variety of content-driven use-cases and lifecycle management of all unstructured data. And last, but certainly not least, Consumer Data Privacy provides several important data privacy and consumer data protection features, including data discovery tailored to finding all of a particular user’s data, the generation of data access reports, and the removal or redaction of sensitive data from your system. Note that much of the functionality on offer across SOLIXCloud is especially relevant – and overall, extremely helpful – when grappling with compliance mandates such as GDPR. Most of all, Enterprise Archiving includes robust data retention capabilities, and together with Consumer Data Privacy directly addresses both DSARs (Data Subject Access Requests) and GDPR’s ‘right to be forgotten’.

SOLIXCloud is more than just these four solutions, however. Considering Figure 1, we see that they are surrounded by ingestion, management and access layers. The former, Solix Connect, supports end to end connectivity across hundreds of data sources, while the latter, Solix Search, offers universal and self-service search access to your data that can be integrated with a handful of third-party products via API, most notably including Tableau, Qlik, and PowerBI.

Fig 02 – SOLIXCloud data lineage

The management layer, consisting of centralised metadata management and data governance, is provided via a data catalogue, which features a business glossary, policy management, policy-based data classification, and automated tagging on ingestion, among other things. The catalogue can also ingest data from other catalogues (although at present this does not go both ways: you cannot push changes made in SOLIXCloud to other products). Graphical data lineage is provided (see Figure 2), as are data quality and data processing. Data governance is catered to more specifically via the automated discovery, tagging and protection of sensitive data; data masking; and role-based access control, to name only a few relevant features. This ties into Consumer Data Privacy and the data retention management offered by Enterprise Archiving to create a wide-ranging compliance solution.

For starters, SOLIXCloud provides access to much of Solix CDP’s functionality in a cloud-native setting. This is valuable in and of itself, but as with Solix CDP, SOLIXCloud is most prominently ahead of the pack when it comes to enabling regulatory compliance generally, via data retention in particular. The presence of Consumer Data Privacy and Enterprise Archiving alongside its more standard data governance functionality is a significant factor here. In particular, it allows you to set data retention policies that effectively automate your retention management, up to and including removing expired data automatically. Structured data can be purged systematically (as shown in Figure 3), such that your system as a whole always remains consistent and referentially intact, while unstructured data can be redacted (in other words, blacked out) from whichever document it’s embedded in. You cannot currently purge documents containing sensitive data in their entirety (according to Solix this will be present in a future release) but even without that capability, SOLIXCloud is substantially ahead of the curve when it comes to data retention.

Fig 03 – SOLIXCloud purge configuration

Unfortunately, SOLIXCloud suffers from somewhat limited third-party integration. For example, it will pull from (but not push to) other catalogues (though this is planned for a future release), and it can’t ingest data lineage from other sources. That said, the platform is highly integrated within itself (which is to say that it is interoperable) and the selection of data sources available through Solix Connect is impressive. What’s more, we are told that much of these integration concerns will be addressed (if not, remedied entirely) in the product’s next release.

The Bottom Line

SOLIXCloud provides many of the capabilities of Solix Common Data Platform in a cloud-native format. In doing so, it offers a cloud data management solution that is particularly adept at enabling regulatory compliance via sophisticated data archival and retention management.