ZERO-COPY INTEGRATION
"How can we accelerate and scale the delivery of new digital solutions AND improve data protection?"
- Every CXO, everywhere
GLOBALIZED DATA REQUIRES UNIVERSAL CONTROL
Zero-Copy Integration is a national standard for delivering digital transformation projects from a foundation of meaningful
data ownership and collaboration-based innovation.
The Data Collaboration Alliance is a member of the Technical Committee at the Digital Governance Council which developed the ZCI framework for the Standards Council of Canada
TIMELINE
Second Half 2024 - Review by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 40
July 2024 - General updates by Digital Governance Council
February 21, 2023 - Information Session (watch above or via YouTube)
February 15, 2023 - 'Zero-copy' applications published by DCA
February 08, 2023 - Published by Digital Governance Council (Press release)
December 15, 2022 - Approved by Standards Council of Canada
June-Nov 2022 - Public consultation period
Feb 2021 - May 2022 - Technical Committee development
CORE PRINCIPLES
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Decouple data from apps
(shared architectures, not silos)
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Establish data products, federate governance
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Prioritize active metadata over complex code
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Access-based collaboration,
not copy-based integration
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Set access controls at metadata-layer, not app code
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Prioritize composability over monolithic solutions
NEWS COVERAGE
Zero-Copy Integration: Finally, A Data Standard That’s More Help Than Headache
Forbes (June 8, 2023)
Zero-Copy Integration: How Small Data Practices Will Replace Big Data
Dataversity (March 10, 2023)
Canada wants to phase out data copying
Blocks & Files (March 01, 2023)
Getting Used to Zero Trust? Meet Zero Copy
Cybersecurity Law Report (March 01, 2023)
Canada pioneers standard to improve IT transformation efficiency
Beta News (February 12, 2023)
For enterprise APIs, is Zero-Copy Integration the David to big data’s Goliath?
TechRupublic (February 09, 2023)
AWS Steps Toward Zero-ETL Future Don’t Go Far Enough
insideBIGDATA (January 04, 2023)
What Meta’s GDPR fine can teach CISOs about data protection
VentureBeat (September 08, 2022)
Why Digital Transformation and Data Integration Are Natural Enemies – and How That Can Change
DATAVERSITY (August 22, 2022)
Is a Recession Coming? Here’s How to Cut IT Costs Wisely
The New Stack (June 14, 2022)
STRATEGIC NEED: FASTER INNOVATION
Current approaches to digital innovation that necessitate the creation of data silos and copy-based data integration represent a significant drain on problem-solving capacity.
It's an ever-increasing tax on innovation.
In contrast, the proposed standard for Zero-Copy Integration outlines a framework for developing new digital solutions where people and systems collaborate on data within a copy-less environment.
In the Zero-Copy Integration framework, the only barrier to digital innovation being granted access to data from its rightful owner - the shared data architecture eliminates the overhead of requesting access from IT teams, standing up new databases, and performing copy-based data integration.
STRATEGIC NEED: DATA PROTECTION
The traditional approach to data sharing is a complex and risky process where information is copied between data silos (apps, databases, data warehouses, data lakes, spreadsheets etc) generally via ETL or API-based data integration.
This has the following impact on data protection:
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Consistent enforcement of access controls is extremely difficult, if not impossible
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Correction and deletion of data is extremely difficult, if not impossible
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Precision auditing of data usage is extremely difficult, if not impossible
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Porting data from one environment to another is extremely difficult
For organizations large and small, these issues present significant challenges for compliance with increasingly strict trade agreements and data protection regulations.
In the Zero-Copy Integration framework, the elimination of silos and copies enables access controls to be set once in a shared data architecture at at the metadata-layer and then universally-enforced across all digital solutions, greatly simplifying lineage, compliance, and auditability.