Legacy methods of data migration have become less reliable options in a cloud-centric world.

Steve Wilkes, the Co-Founder and CTO of Striim (modern, reliable data integration for private and public clouds), discusses real-time data integration with TFiR. The founders of Striim were executives at Golden Gate Software, which was sold to Oracle in 2009. That company provided database replication for high availability with a focus on Oracle to Oracle. Golden Gate customers often said there was a lot of value in moving data and the “real time-ness” of the data being moved. That led to the genesis of the new company which was, according to Wilkes, “to build a full end-to-end, real-time data platform that could collect data from a variety of sources in real-time, sub-seconds after it has been created, be able to process that data, move it to where it needed to go, and do all of this in an enterprise-grade fashion that was reliable, secure, and could handle mission-critical applications.”

Striim now has a worldwide presence and their message of real-time data is resonating with the rest of the industry.

According to Wilkes, the difference between real-time data integration and legacy models is, “…there is no longer a notion of a batch or a job. Real-time data integration is something that is continuous. It is 24/7.” Wilkes continues, “So you are continuously collecting data as it’s being created, continually processing it, continually delivering it and putting it where it needs to go.”

As to why real-time data integration matters to cloud adoption, Wilkes believes the issue lies in the fact that an organization’s data resides in different locations (public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, and on-premises) and that data must be in order to get the answers needed. Wilkes addresses the legacy method like so: “In the last decade, there was this shift to this notion of big data, that people could just move all of their data in a raw form into a huge lake, and then come back later and ask questions of it and get all the answers they wanted.”

He then states that the idea never completely materialized, which led to a shift back to data warehouses. Now, the shift is towards the cloud. However, Wilkes states, “There’s quite a lot of different moving parts there, and you need to be able to connect all of those in real-time if you’re going to succeed in data integration.”

Video summary was written by Jack Wallen