How data product marketplaces enable IT team success

Democratizing data access is at the heart of increasing consumption and turning data into business value. Humans and AI must be able to easily discover the right data for their needs, and then access and consume it independently through self-service, without needing IT or data team support. They have to understand and trust the data if they are to use it within their everyday work, building a more productive, innovative and collaborative data-driven culture.

Achieving this relies on a collaborative approach across the whole organization: business teams, data teams and IT, working together to share, consume and provide feedback around data and its usage. Two technologies are the foundation of this collaboration. Accessible high quality data products and data product marketplaces which provide intuitive, self-service access to both data products and other organizational assets.

This article examines the role of IT teams in delivering an IT infrastructure that maximizes data consumption and value, and explores how the data product marketplace underpins their success.

The IT function is tasked with the strategic and operational management of the IT infrastructure, including security, performance, scalability and efficiency, supporting current and future business needs.

There are four key sets of roles within the IT team, all of whom benefit from data product marketplaces: 

• CIO/IT Directors
• DevOps/Cloud Engineers
• Security Leads/Data Protection Officers/Data Governance Leads
• Architects/Data Architects

CIOs define IT strategy and architecture, manage operations and build strong relationships with the business to understand and support changing requirements.  Responsible for technical architecture, security, IT integration and ongoing IT operations, for CIOs the data product is a standardized, secure and interoperable component of the overall information system.

Key objectives for CIOs

Industrialize and integrate data into IT infrastructure to:

• Provide a robust and secure IT backbone for the business
• Seamlessly integrate all solutions into the IT landscape
• Deliver scalability, security, and performance
• Enable fast implementations to support business time-to-market

How a data product marketplace benefits CIOs

Data product marketplaces deliver four key benefits to CIOs and IT Directors. They:

1. Enable secure access to data through access management and data contracts, protecting information and ensuring audit, compliance, and governance
2. Maximize impact and ROI of IT.data infrastructure making data easily available and consumable
3. Increase efficiency and free up IT resources through easy administration
4. Standardize access to data through single, centralized tool

As part of this, CIOs rely on these key data product marketplace features: 

• Ability to share all types of data assets (data products, datasets, documents, visualizations, or use cases) through an engaging, single source of truth
• Connectors and integrations capabilities seamlessly bring together internal and external data sources and tools
• Robust security and granular access management aligning with corporate standards such as SSI and MFA
• Information security compliance with frameworks such as ISO 27001, ensuring audit readiness and risk management
• Governance and regulatory support to align with internal policies, industry standards, and external regulations
• Scalable SaaS performance supporting increasing data volumes and user growth.

Through a range of roles, IT teams manage the overall IT infrastructure and systems on a day-to-day basis, ensuring availability, security and scalability.

Architects and data architects are responsible for ensuring the consistency and interoperability of the IT landscape. Their main objective is to deliver clear, transparent IT infrastructure that matches business needs.

The primary benefit of a data product for architects and data architects is the provision of close integration with the complete IT stack, through connectors and APSs.

Responsible for deployments and IT operations, the primary objective of DevOps and cloud engineers is to smoothly introduce new software/tools and connect to cloud resources.

How a data product marketplace benefits DevOps/Cloud Engineers

Data product marketplaces deliver three key benefits to DevOps and cloud engineers:

1. Close integration with technical tools to manage pipelines and deployments
2. Ability to connect to cloud-based data using virtualization
3. APIs and connectors to integrate stored data and technical tools.

Bearing responsibility for security, compliance, privacy, and governance, the objective for security leads, data protection officers and data governance leads is to ensure compliance and security through clear, auditable processes.

How a data product marketplace benefits Security Leads/Data Protection Officers/Data Governance Leads  

This group derives three key benefits from a data product marketplace:

1. Ability to support sovereign cloud requirements
2. Application of corporate security standards such as MFA and SSO
3. Full audit trail for both data usage and access

With day-to-day responsibility for management of the overall IT infrastructure and systems, all roles in IT teams benefit from these core data product marketplace features:

• Secure data integration and access via robust APIs and native connectors (including virtualization mode to avoid data duplication)
• Governance and security support (SSO, MFA, and compliance frameworks)
• Data enrichment and processing to cleanse, transform, and prepare datasets
• Customizable metadata templates to comply with organizational standards
• Real-time monitoring, alerts, and audit trails to ensure system reliability and usage
• Choice of AI provider for AI-based features
• Automated data operations to reduce manual workload
• Built-in workflows to streamline collaboration between data and business teams
• Data lineage visualization to track dependencies and ensure data reliability
• Scalable performance with high availability and multi-cloud support

The data product marketplace: a strategic enabler for all

Data products bring business, data and IT teams together, providing a shared language and framework around data. Just like any other product, to deliver success they require continual monitoring and improvement in collaboration with business stakeholders and their needs. Data product marketplaces act as a strategic enabler to drive data product adoption, offering a point of organizational convergence, facilitating collaboration and acting as a foundation for AI and generative AI. Through this they provide a practical way to turn data into measurable business value.

Want to learn more about the different business, data and IT roles involved in successful data programs? Download the ebook to get the full picture.