We’ve talked about why data quality is difficult, where to start with implementing a data quality process, and what makes a good data quality test (plus 5 examples of them).
And now that we’ve covered theory, approach, and process, it’s time to get down to brass tacks. What tools should you use to carry out that whole “technical implementation” aspect?
Here are 5 reasons GX Cloud is the best choice for starting up your purposeful, intentional data quality.
1. It’s an end-to-end platform… for all the many ends
GX Cloud covers the full length of your data quality process, and the full breadth of people who need to be involved.
Because “doing data quality” isn’t a singular task (if only). It’s not even a two-dimensional process. It’s an entire sprawling ecosystem of iterative activity that spans your entire technical stack and involves practically everyone at your organization on some level.
GX Cloud supports you in every part of this ecosystem: technical capabilities, your process, and your people.
On the technical side, it has you covered from profiling tools for your very first look at brand-new data to historical quality results that track your data’s state for the lifetime of your systems… and all the places in between.
GX Cloud is extremely responsive to your process needs. Deploy it throughout your pipeline at the key points where you want to catch issues before they can have downstream impact. The shorter the spaces between checks, the less overhead it takes to narrow down the source of a failure.
Use GX Cloud’s scheduling to make sure your data is checked regularly, and notifications so that the right people find out about incidents as soon as they happen for fast-responding remediation.
For the people aspects of your data quality process, GX Cloud makes collaboration easy. It has accessible point-and-click user interfaces ensuring easy entry for nontechnical stakeholders, while technical and data teams are empowered with extensibility.
2. It scales up your data quality coverage and your institutional knowledge
With GX Cloud, your data quality efforts start returning useful results and building institutional knowledge right away.
We’ve all seen “transformative” initiatives with ambitious scope that get bogged down before they can start doing anything really helpful.
Using GX Cloud, you won’t join that ignomious company. GX Cloud is incredibly easy to deploy. Create an account and then start creating Expectations on a critical juncture in your data, and you could have meaningful data quality testing that detects real problems in place the same day.
It’s just as simple to scale your GX Cloud usage, and it’s entirely on your own timeline. Expand your data quality super fast up front, work slow but steady, intermittent bursts of effort—whatever strategy lets you scale best, GX Cloud supports it. When you’re ready to advance beyond GX Cloud’s developer tier, your costs are usage-based relative to your data—in other worlds, they’re completely predictable.
A key point: scale isn’t just the technical distribution that we’ve been talking about so far. It’s also about building the depth of knowledge within the data quality process that allows you to create additional and more sophisticated tests as you solidify your current knowledge of the data.
Just by using GX Cloud, you create an accessible central repository of your data quality checks and their histories. This is a valuable font of institutional knowledge that creates the critical continuity you need to scale your data quality sophistication, even as individual people come and go.
3. It’s ready to use for all your stakeholders
With all stakeholders working comfortably in one place, GX Cloud promotes frictionless collaboration and transparency between everyone working on your data quality process. (But not too much transparency: security is still a thing, which is why GX Cloud has RBAC and GX is SOC2 Type II compliant.)
With its friendly user interface that guides users along clear workflows, GX Cloud makes it possible for nontechnical stakeholders to participate in the data quality process as the equal and essential contributors they are.
That participation is crucial not just for achieving the diagnostic perfection of your testing, but for building a sense of buy-in and value outside of data teams. And that’s something you need if you want to get ongoing, tangible support for your data quality work.
On the other end, GX Cloud also ensures that technical stakeholders can still make full use of all their preferred tools. While the SaaS interface is always available to technical users when they want it, technical users can use GX Cloud’s APIs to facilitate their own workflows, including integration of GX Cloud with orchestrators to support data quality investigations and root cause analysis.
4. One word: Expectations
GX Cloud uses Expectations—our approach to conceptualizing and implementing data quality tests—which are a proven method for conducting transparent, adaptable testing and validation.
With Expectations, GX Cloud improves your data quality team’s productivity without depending on black boxes or opaque automation.
Expectations increase productivity through their expressiveness and specificity. An Expectation isn’t looking for generic anomalies or to meet an arbitrary statistical threshold: it’s comparing the data against a desirable state that’s been precisely, meaningfully defined. A failing Expectation tells you exactly what aspect of your data is having the issue and what the issue is—a degree of context that’s crucial for rapid response.
And on top of that, “black box” and “opaque” aren’t just scare words. Those approaches might seem easy up front, but understanding their behavior so you can react appropriately is a learning curve. And it’s one that each new participant in the data quality process has to climb themselves. Documentation helps, but it’s so easy for documentation to fall out of date—we’ve all seen it.
GX Cloud is completely transparent in terms of which Expectations are being used, where, their strictness, and their configuration. And in GX Cloud, Expectations themselves document their own behavior and results, so they’re never out of date. Long term, this transparency provides an ease of use and exceptionally gentle learning curve that is essential to a smoothly-functioning data quality process.
Expectations cover the core set of data quality dimensions: schema, freshness, volume, missingness, basic semantic type, cardinality, distribution and type-based issues. These dimensions can produce sophisticated insights, particularly in combination with each other.
5. It’s powered by the most popular data quality framework in the world: GX Core
We’re not guessing when we say that Expectations are the most effective way to test data, or hypothesizing about the efficacy of our data quality process.
GX Cloud might be relatively new (it entered public preview in February 2024), but it’s powered by GX Core, the most popular data quality framework in the world, proven in deployments worldwide.
Our approach to data quality is distilled from the years of our own work, our more than 11,000 community members, and our hundreds of open source contributors. It’s a holistic perspective that you’ll be hard-pressed to find in our competitors.
GX Cloud bundles all that expertise and process experience into a super-simple setup and implementation that relieves stresses on already-overworked data teams.
And it’s not just our past experience with GX Core that you’ll benefit from in GX Cloud. GX Core is still very much an active open source project—so all that ongoing innovation, continuous updates, and flexibility carries over into GX Cloud. Where it’s delivered straight to you.
Start using GX Cloud
To recap, GX Cloud gives you:
An end-to-end platform for all the many ends of a data quality process
Scalability for your data quality coverage and your institutional knowledge
A ready-to-use platform for all your stakeholders
Expectations
The power of the world’s most popular data quality framework
There’s never been a better time to move from distributed, ad-hoc processes to a platform that will support you long-term: GX Cloud.
Start using GX Cloud today. Our free developer tier means your only commitment to start out is your time:
Request a demo if you need to see more before you try it out.
