The concept of shifting left—which originated in software development as the practice of moving testing to earlier in the development process—applies seamlessly to the realm of data integration. In this context, it means embedding data processing, quality checks, and governance closer to the data source.
The result? Faster, easier access to reliable data where it’s needed across the organization.
of IT leaders foresee extensive benefits of shifting left in data integration, including reduced costs and risks.
The ultimate goal of shifting left is to provide clean, reliable, secure, and timely access to important data, treating it as a first-class building block for services, analytics, and AI capabilities.
Improved data quality and reduced data processing costs for operational and analytical workloads topped the list of major or significant benefits, followed by reduced effort for downstream consumers, and reduced overall development and operational costs and risks.
By facilitating timely access to reliable data sets, shifting left ultimately provides businesses with the foundation for building data products—trustworthy data sets, purpose-built to share and reuse across multiple teams and services—so that they can accelerate innovation and bring applications to market faster.
For example, in financial services, data streams from accounts and payments can first be used to build a fraud detection system.
Those same data products can then be reused to power a customer payment notification system for a banking application.
Beyond reuse, data products enable more confident data sharing across business units, enable more robust risk management, and help foster a culture where data is viewed as a shared enterprise asset.
The whopping majority of IT leaders rate support for shift-left processing as mandatory or highly desirable when considering a data streaming platform. That’s because data streaming platforms not only connect and stream data across a vast ecosystem of technologies and environments but also enable continuous, in-stream processing and governance of that data.
This creates a world where shifting left is possible by ensuring unified, simplified, and secure data access across both operational and analytical systems—helping businesses accelerate time to market for innovative new applications.
