Federal agencies create, collect, and store large volumes of data from many sources. Many agencies struggle to aggregate and analyze these multi-varied data sets to produce meaningful insights. Often this is because data are typically stored in infrastructure silos based on the type, source, format, business and mission owners, and governing policies. Many agencies lack the ability to ingest and normalize disparate data so that a consistent, single version of the truth across all sources of information can be utilized for aggregation, correlation, and analyses.
In many cases, the data being integrated reside on legacy systems, in various formats, many of which were created for flat file, network, or hierarchical databases. Each legacy system has a unique approach for storing or extracting data, so data integration may require numerous techniques for coping with heterogeneity. The result is that data integration often involves a Herculean task to homogenize disparate data sets — often involving hand coding — so they can be correlated and processed.
Other challenges that trip up federal efforts to integrate data, include poor quality data, lack of storage capacity, unanticipated costs, lack of necessary technical skills and data management expertise, and the perception by many that data integration is simply too overwhelming to attempt.
Once the hard work of data integration is done, there often are visualization challenges that prevent users from discerning actionable insights and meaningful relationships between disparate data.
Consequently, many agencies fail to fully unlock the value of their data resources in support of mission goals. These challenges also undermine their ability to integrate machine data into their operations, support Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, and evolve their digital operations to address current and future business and mission needs.
Federal agencies need a way to integrate numerous, multi-varied data simply and quickly and then easily find valuable mission and business insights. Neola Group understands these challenges and has worked with numerous federal agencies, such as NASA, to integrate large volumes of heterogenous data to create value and insight that ultimately enhances mission performance and success.
Neola Group has helped NASA pull together streams of medical information to produce real-time views of astronaut health profiles. The data includes live streaming sensor data coming from space suit sensors, genomic data, health records, and more. This data integration enables NASA to monitor astronauts’ health in real time for signs of distress as well as conduct longer-term studies of how space environments affect human physiology.
Federal agencies need a way to integrate any data stream or data set simply and quickly. Neola Group utilizes the Pentaho Data Integration platform to ingest and integrate data of any volume, velocity, type, format or source quickly and easily. Pentaho Data Integration provides easy-to-use tools to harness data for actionable insight. These include powerful data extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities; an intuitive and rich graphical design environment; and an open and standards-based architecture.
Pentaho also supports multi-tenant architecture, allowing the embedding of analytics into any workflow application, even if it is running in the cloud or on a mobile device. Pentaho’s drag and drop capability reduces the time and complexity of integrating big data sources by avoiding the need to write code and by providing a template-based approach to quickly onboard data sources into Hadoop. In addition, Pentaho’s enterprise scalability and performance, including in-memory caching, and its ability to integrate with Hadoop, NoSQL, traditional online transaction processing (OLTP), and analytic databases, make it a more versatile choice over proprietary and homegrown data integration tools.
Finally, Pentaho is a highly intuitive platform so that anyone across the agency — whether they are in IT or on the mission end of IT —can access and visualize data easily. Its detailed visualizations and easy-to-understand infographics, with available data drilling and filters, make the job of harvesting insights and actionable intelligence simple.
Federal agencies need data-driven solutions, approaches, and insights to effectively address today’s challenges, which are more complex than ever before. So agencies must be capable of harnessing the power of data to solve mission challenges, realize operational efficiencies, and remain relevant in a digital world. Pentaho Data Integration can help them do that. As a secure, scalable, easy-to-operate COTS platform that integrates easily into existing federal and military environments, Pentaho Data Integration helps agencies maximize the value of their existing and future data inventories for better decisions and outcomes.
To learn more about how Neola Group can help your agency, go to http://www.neolagroup.com.
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