enov8
Enov8: Eliminating the Complexity of Understanding and Managing your IT Environments and Data

Navigating the modern IT and test environment can seem like stumbling through a labyrinth. From applications, data, infrastructure, middleware, resources, process, procedures and tools, there is a lot to keep track of. Niall Crawford, a passionate evangelist of IT and test environment management best practices, who has experienced these challenges first-hand, decided to help businesses to manage their IT and non-production environments much more efficiently.

“My experience across different industries allowed me to see how complicated organizations can be from an IT perspective. Most businesses were suffering from the same problem and most companies were building bespoke tools, and typically re-inventing the wheel, to address it,” he says. “Yet, nothing changed; in fact, the problem only got worse over time as the reliance on digital and data grew.” Crawford realized the need of the hour was a solution that promoted better understanding and management across an enterprise’s IT landscape, including their test environment, data, and operations.

To that end, he founded Sydney-based Enov8 to help organizations efficiently manage their IT environments and data across the software development lifecycle. “We specialize in building enterprise solutions for IT and Test environment management, release management, and test data management (data compliance),” avers Crawford, founder and CIO, Enov8.

Enov8’s “first commercial” solution, the Enov8 Environment Manager, built using their own “low-code/no-code” platform called Ecosystem is an “enterprise intelligence” platform that that helps organizations better visualize and manage their complex IT fabric. It is a solution that ultimately reduces IT infrastructure, license, and service costs through operational standardization and streamlined automation. “We used our extensible engine Ecosystem to give us competitive edge,” asserts Crawford, “although it was an upfront investment it now allows us to add new functions and features much more rapidly than conventional development methods”.

Re-leveraging the extensible Ecosystem architecture, Enov8 then added their next key offering, Data Compliance Suite (DCS)—a platform that uses AI and automation to understand complex data structures, identify data privacy risks, remediate risks using automatically generated obfuscation routines, and then compliance-test to check if the risks have been addressed. “We like to describe it simply as PMV,” explains Crawford, “that is profile, mask and validate.” It also serves as a solution that gives compliance and security teams a “birds-eye view” of where ‘personally identifiable information’ (PII) resides and provide DevTest engineers methods to easily address it.

For us, it’s all about understanding your data, and helping you remediate it as easily as possible

In addition to data security, DCS also enables businesses to accelerate IT project and development activities with ‘self-service’ ‘DataOps Libraries’ to automate data operations and ultimately remove human error. Furthermore, the use of the ‘Data View’ component provides pre-configured and share-able data mining routines, which help developers and testers rapidly find ‘fit for purpose’ data and support their day-to-day development and test activities.

Highlighting the factors that differentiate Enov8 from other data security or test data management companies, Crawford mentions, “Firstly, our solutions are easy to use and implement. Secondly, they promote end-to-end automation. And, lastly, we provide dashboards and reports from both directions: bottom up and top down.” Bottom-up reports help engineers carry out deep-dive analysis and the top-down reporting allows management or stakeholders to get executive information such as what platforms are currently compliant and so on.

To further illustrate the value Enov8 brings to its customers, Crawford cites a customer success story involving a global financial client based in the Asia Pacific region. “The client was struggling with securing thousands of complex platforms across different geographies. We also identified that if they continued to use their existing legacy data masking tools, the remediation of their end-to-end environment would take them around 20 years to secure,” states Crawford. Engaging with Enov8, the client was able to build up a federated and agile framework that enabled them to start remediation such as discovery and masking immediately and execute them across various platforms in parallel.

Such proven successes have made Enov8 a real catalyst for change in the data security and IT environment landscape. Leveraging their EcoSystem platform, Enov8 is currently building a sister product to DCS called unstructured data scan (UDS). “UDS can be used to search across an organization’s IT fabric and identify data leakage. It will help enterprises prevent data loss by actively scanning key sources of content or information. For example, we can use the UDS solution to scan file systems or collaboration tools like Confluence and SharePoint and ticketing systems like ServiceNow or JIRA,” asserts Crawford. UDS is currently in beta testing stage; Enov8 is looking for a formal launch around July, 2021. “For us, it’s all about understanding your data, and helping you remediate it as easily as possible,” wraps up Crawford.