A new data service from Microsoft aims to make it easier to share data across organisations.
Azure Data Share allows data professionals to easily and safely share big data with external organisations in Azure Blob Storage and Azure Data Lake Storage.
As the company explains, with the volume, variety and type of data growing exponentially, organisations need to collaborate with data of any size and shape. To get the most out of data it may need to be shared and combined with other data beyond organisational boundaries with business partners and third parties. However, sharing data in a simple and governed way is challenging.
Common data sharing approaches using file transfer protocol (FTP) or web APIs tend to be bespoke development and require infrastructure to manage. These tools do not provide the security or governance required to meet enterprise standards, and they often are not suitable for sharing large datasets, Microsoft said.
A fully managed service, Azure Data Share does not require infrastructure to set up and it scales to meet big data sharing demands.
With just a few clicks data professionals can choose which data to share and who to share it with. They can schedule the service to automatically share new or changed data relating to specific datasets, or stop future updates from flowing through. To receive the data, recipients must agree to the terms of use specified.
As an example, retailers can use Azure Data Share to easily share sales inventory and demographic data for demand forecasting and price optimisation with their suppliers.
And in the finance industry, Microsoft has collaborated with Finastra to integrate Azure Data Share with the fintech’s open platform, FusionFabric.cloud, enabling seamless distribution of datasets to a wider ecosystem of application developers.
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