“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”

Written over 160 years ago, to open A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens could have well been describing the state of cross-enterprise data exchange today.

• The best of times because when data-driven enterprises share data, they improve their offerings, lower their costs, remove risks, and lessen their compliance burdens.
• The worst of times because business and technology complexities often make cross-enterprise data exchange still seem like an impossible task.
• The age of wisdom as proven cross-enterprise data exchange platforms like Eightwire can now remove these barriers and greatly simplify the data exchange process.
• The age of foolishness as many organisations try to stretch their historical data exchange technologies such as FTP, APIs, and custom-coding, to meet today’s more expansive business and technical requirements, including security, privacy consent, governance, and more.

Why is exchanging data so challenging to do?

Many barriers make cross-enterprise data sharing difficult.

• Diversity: No two data-sharing agreements are alike. Business terms vary widely, as do the source and consumer data types, connections, structures, and formats, along with the unique transformations required to resolve these differences.
• Security: Beyond the complex connections and transformations required, myriad other data-related factors must be considered, such as security, privacy, and consent.
• Service Level Expectations: Reliable, scalable, and available data exchange operations, 24x7x365, are a must.
• Many Players: Many individuals in business, IT, and security are required to complete the data exchange process from negotiation through renewal, increasing communication and coordination issues.
• Incomplete Tools: Typical data sharing tools and methods are only partial solutions designed to address the technical side of the problem without addressing business and security requirements.

Why not keep exchanging data the way you always have?

Today’s data exchange tools fail to provide complete solutions to your data-sharing problem.

• Technology-centric solutions such as FTP, APIs, and custom-coding, often fail to consider business requirements such as security, scalability, control, and governance. You require a complete solution with everything you need to accomplish the job.
• Manual processes bound with human glue can be error-prone and often don’t scale. You should be able to automate the complex exchange process end-to-end. And while you are at it, you should have visibility and control over every step.

If you are like most organizations, the result is that you reinvent the wheel every time you need to share data.

Rather than continue to stretch your old tools, would it not be better to meet your business and technical needs with purpose-built data exchange platforms available in the cloud?

Its time to put an end to the foolishness

In my next blog, we will introduce the idea of an end-to-end data exchange platform and describe how it enables you to exchange data better than your current tools and processes.