Why are we launching
Integrating external data has never been more critical to drive alpha and outperform the competition. Yet, ingesting external data is riddled with challenges. Most external data is not clean nor analytics-ready, and even when companies successfully integrate it, they face persistent data quality issues:
Data teams spend 80% of their time preparing data rather than analyzing it, and 76% of data scientists cite data preparation as the least enjoyable part of their job. This inefficiency slows decision-making and increases operational costs. Sphere by Crux – Self Service solves the challenges of external data integration by giving data teams complete control, empowering them to build and manage external data products without the usual overhead, complexity, or costs.
What problem are we solving
We've all felt frustrations when external data integration becomes a never-ending process. Whether ingesting unstructured files, handling broken pipelines due to unprecedented schema changes, or resolving data freshness, completeness, and quality inconsistencies, managing external data often requires significant engineering effort. Even after onboarding, monitoring data quality, timeliness, and integrity becomes a significant operational burden and risk.
Organizations today struggle with:
These obstacles make it difficult for data teams to quickly onboard, manage, and trust external data. This ultimately prevents them from shifting to higher-purpose tasks and negatively impacts business outcomes.
The solution and its benefits
Sphere by Crux – Self Service provides a streamlined, step-by-step approach for ingesting, monitoring, and managing external data with minimal overhead throughout the dataset’s lifecycle. By standardizing external data integration and eliminating manual processes with automation and AI, Crux empowers data teams to operate with agility and confidence.
Crux Studio provides an intuitive environment for building model-ready data products from scratch. The step-by-step workflow simplifies data integration, from establishing a secure connection to automating data normalization and processing, identifying historical and active schema, scheduling ongoing deliveries, and testing and deploying the data to data warehouses, including Snowflake, BigQuery, AWS S3, GCS, FTP, SFTP, or Azure Blob Storage. As part of the onboarding workflow, Crux provides ODIN (Open Data Information Nomenclature) specifications for each of your datasets. This structured, declarative approach to data management empowers your data teams to collaborate efficiently throughout the entire data lifecycle and be flexible in responding to changing data needs without compromising your downstream dependencies.
With Crux Studio, data teams can independently create external datasets, reducing reliance on engineering resources and accelerating access to analytics-ready data. Using Crux Studio accelerates external data onboarding, reducing weeks of work to minutes. It helps data teams like yours reduce engineering and operation bottlenecks, freeing resources for high-value tasks. You can build data products on demand and scale operations seamlessly with a flexible self-service model that grows with business needs.
You can now access your data from the My Data menu, where you can quickly browse, search, and filter data products you have created. You can also dynamically update the datasets, such as changing delivery schedules and deadlines to identify late or missed deliveries and other dataset metadata and configurations. You can also securely establish and manage source and destination connections to maintain data integrity and pipeline stability, even if your access credentials change or you want to update connection configurations. Crux provides enterprise-grade security and compliance for safe data handling and connection management.
The Health Dashboard provides a graphical interface for monitoring the quality and reliability of your datasets. Crux tracks the integrity of your data and helps detect delayed, missed, or failed deliveries. It helps you to quickly triage and identify the root cause of failures and delays, such as files missing from the supplier’s sources, connection access problems, or schema drift, and quickly recover by re-running failed deliveries, thereby accelerating MTTD and MTTR. With the Health Dashboard, you can identify historical delivery trends, detect and remediate potential supplier or pipeline issues, and prevent downstream disruptions before they impact your business operations or costs. Additionally, Crux alerts provide all the necessary information to automatically detect the anomalies in real time and quickly address the root cause before they impact your downstream systems. Stay informed on delayed, missed, or failed data deliveries, schema changes, and other anomalies, ensure high-quality, trusted datasets, and continuously optimize the efficiency and reliability of your data.
Besides creating and managing data products in a self-service environment, you can also explore Crux Catalog, which serves as a structured inventory of all data products available to Sphere by Crux - Managed Service customers. Crux Catalog simplifies your discovery and exploration of external data products supported by Crux in managed mode. You can swiftly discover, search for, and review the metadata of these data products and dive deep into the data dictionary and schema version tracking, which enhances transparency in governance and compliance across the continually evolving datasets. As an added benefit, Crux Catalog showcases a practical example of a successfully onboarded data product, serving as a model for the data products you can develop in Sphere by Crux - Self Service using Crux Studio.
What happy outcome do we expect Self Service users to experience
By using Sphere by Crux – Self Service, organizations can:
Cut operational costs and reduce overhead by automating manual processes
Sphere by Crux – Self Service is now available for organizations seeking to accelerate and streamline external data integration. Contact us here or request a demo and start building your first data product today!
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