Ascend.io Expands Its Unified Data Engineering Platform and Accelerates the Economics of Data with the Release of Ascend Govern

An Industry First, Data Teams Can Now Calculate Data’s ROI to Demonstrate Business Impact with Integrated Cataloging, Costing, Lineage, Security and Reporting

PALO ALTO, Calif. – Mar. 24, 2020 – Ascend.io, the data engineering company, today announced it has expanded the Ascend Unified Data Engineering Platform with the addition of Ascend Govern, a first of its kind suite of tracking, reporting, and security capabilities for a more granular understanding of how data is being used throughout an organization. Ascend Govern records and permanently maintains an in-depth understanding of the linkages between code, data, and users, providing a level of visibility and auditability never before possible.

“Until now, data teams have been largely unable to answer questions about the true cost, value, and ultimately, the ROI of their data initiatives,” said Steven Parkes, CTO at Ascend.io. “These questions on the ‘Datanomics’ of the business are vital in demonstrating the business value of data-driven initiatives. Ascend Govern is the first solution to provide the confidence data teams need to know exactly where data came from, where it’s going, what it costs, and what the eventual value is, providing an unprecedented level of understanding to the business.”

Unlike current siloed solutions, Ascend enables modern data governance with a unified and integrated approach to cataloging, lineage, security, and reporting. Backed by the platform’s DataAware™ intelligence, Ascend observes and maintains detailed records of data movement and processing, code changes, and user activity. This introduces a number of data governance capabilities never before possible from large-scale data management architectures, including:

• Automated Cataloging: Ascend Govern provides data teams organized and searchable access to all code and data under the platform’s management, with automated registration of new data sets and code.
• Data Lineage Service: For any piece of data managed within the Ascend platform, data teams can track down to a column level where it came from, the entire series of code that ran on it, and where it went.
• Resource and Cost Reporting: For every piece of data in the system, Ascend reports the resources required, historically and at present, to produce and maintain it.
• Secure Data Feeds: The safest and easiest way to connect data pipelines across organizational and security boundaries to limit data access while preserving metadata lineage and integrity.
• Activity Monitoring and Reporting: Tracking of all user, data, and system events, with integration into external platforms such as Splunk and PagerDuty.
• Dynamic Spark Cluster Management: Dynamic creation and destruction of Spark clusters in response to processing needs, ensuring the code that runs on each cluster remains within the appropriate security boundary, and preventing credential or data leakage.
• Data Garbage Collection: Data teams can now have Ascend crawl data storage systems, automatically deleting data that has been abandoned and is no longer associated with active data pipelines.

“Businesses today are laser focused on deriving the maximum value from their data initiatives,” said Keyur Desai, data and analytics expert and the former chief data officer at TD Ameritrade. “However, as data initiatives grow, so too does the business mandate to govern and secure that data, making data governance an essential aspect for successful data-driven transformations. Ascend.io’s innovative approach brings together the cataloging, lineage, reporting, and security capabilities required to provide high-value data governance that can keep up with the speed of business innovation.”

The Ascend Unified Data Engineering Platform

Ascend Govern is the latest advancement of the Ascend Unified Data Engineering Platform, the only platform that gives data teams 10x faster build velocity and automated maintenance for modern data pipelines. Key features of the Ascend platform include:

• Ascend Ingest: Data teams can now easily ingest data with little to no code from any data lake, warehouse, database, stream or API, simply by describing the inputs. Ascend fully automates watching for new data, format conversions, data profiling, and incremental processing.
• Ascend Build: Ascend empowers data teams to architect data pipelines using 95% less code with Declarative Pipeline Definitions written in Python, SQL, and YAML. Ascend’s Interactive Pipeline Builder visually connects code and data with data exploration, rapid prototyping, and lineage navigation.
• Ascend Run: Leveraging the Autonomous Pipeline Engine, data teams can optimize data pipelines and infrastructure with Adaptive Spark Cluster Management, dynamic resourcing, proactive data persistence, and automatic backfills.
• Ascend Integrate: Data teams can connect to data pipelines at any stage of the data lifecycle. Ascend’s Structured Data Lake enables notebooks and big data tools to directly access pipeline optimized files, while Ascend’s connectors ensure data connectivity and consistency to any downstream data system.