Gartner defines analytics and business intelligence platforms (ABI) as those that enable organizations to model, analyze and visualize data to support informed decision making and value creation. These platforms facilitate the preparation of data and the creation of interactive dashboards, reports and visualizations to uncover patterns, predict trends and optimize operations. By doing so, they empower users to collaborate and effectively communicate the dimensions and measures that drive their organization. The platforms may also optionally include the ability to create, modify or enrich a semantic model, including business rules. Analytics and business intelligence platforms integrate data from multiple sources, such as databases, spreadsheets, cloud services and external data feeds, to provide a unified view of data, breaking down silos and transforming raw data into meaningful insights. They also allow users to clean, transform and prepare data for analysis, in addition to creating data models that define relationships between different data entities.
Data masking is based on the premise that sensitive data can be transformed into less sensitive but still useful data. This is necessary to satisfy application testing use cases that require representative and coherent data, as well as analytics that involve the use of aggregate data for scoring, model building and statistical reporting. The market for data protection, DM included, continues to evolve with technologies designed to redact, anonymize, pseudonymize, or in some way deidentify data in order to protect it against confidentiality or privacy risk.
Gartner defines digital communications governance and archiving (DCGA) solutions as designed to enforce corporate governance and regulatory compliance, and derive insights from an evolving number of digital communications tools utilized by organizations. For the various communications tools in use across the enterprise, DCGA solutions enable consistent policy management and enforcement, reveal new data insights, and provide reporting capabilities of their use. Organizations utilize DCGA solutions to proactively manage, monitor, collect and archive communications content. They are critical to an organizations’ efforts to meet a growing number of regulatory compliance mandates and an expanding scope of organizational communications governance and data insights. Compliance requirements include monitoring, oversight, audits and investigations for regulated industries such as financial services and health sciences. They also extend to investigation requirements of the public sector to respond to public records requests. Corporate governance requirements include employee conduct and handling of sensitive data in the use of digital communication tools.
The structured data archiving and application retirement market is identified by an array of technology solutions that manage the life cycle of application-generated data and accommodate corporate and regulatory compliance requirements. Application-generated data is inclusive of databases and related unstructured data. SDA solutions focus on improving the storage efficiency of data generated by on-premises and cloud-based applications and orchestrating the retirement of legacy application data and their infrastructure. The SDA market includes solutions that can be deployed on-premises, and on private and public infrastructure, and includes managed services offerings such as SaaS or PaaS.
Test Data Management (TDM) is the process of provisioning data for development and testing in preproduction environments. It ensures efficient, high-quality datasets while safeguarding data privacy and sensitive corporate information to meet compliance and security requirements. Modern TDM solutions leverage synthetic data generation, alongside data subsetting and masking techniques, to provide realistic yet secure test data. These solutions are widely used by software developers, QA engineers, data analysts, and IT security teams to optimize testing, maintain regulatory compliance, and enhance application reliability.