February 2025 Summaries

Scorpion’s finance team reports that CData Connect Spreadsheets has improved its Excel-based financial planning and analysis by connecting live data from systems including ADP, Sage Intacct, and Monday.com directly into spreadsheets. Nathan Thompson, Scorpion’s finance leader, says the platform replaced manual exports and reconciliations with automated refreshes, allowing models and reports to reflect current information while saving time. The company also uses virtual datasets to provide teams with controlled access to relevant data, supporting collaboration and data governance. Thompson highlights the product’s accessible query interface, responsive customer support, and value for organizations that depend on Excel while working across multiple data systems, rating it five out of five.

CData has introduced drivers and connectors for Greenhouse, the cloud-based hiring platform, enabling organizations to access recruitment and onboarding data from reporting, analytics, database, AI, and custom application environments. The offerings include JDBC, ODBC, ADO.NET, Excel, Tableau, Power BI, Python, and PowerShell connectivity, with future support planned for CData Sync and CData Connect AI. They provide live, read-only access to Greenhouse Harvest API data through SQL-92 queries and API-key authentication, covering entities such as applications, candidates, jobs, and optional custom fields. A Power BI Desktop workflow involves installing the connector, configuring an ODBC data source with an API key, selecting the Greenhouse source in Power BI, and visualizing imported data to monitor hiring and onboarding processes.

Data obfuscation alters sensitive information to make it difficult for unauthorized users or malicious software to interpret while preserving enough utility for approved business processes, analytics, testing, and data sharing. Used across sectors such as finance, healthcare, government, and retail, it can help protect PII, financial records, and intellectual property, support compliance with regulations including GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, reduce breach risks, and potentially lower secure-storage costs. Common techniques include tokenization, randomization, shuffling, blurring, nulling, masking, and pseudonymization, each offering different tradeoffs between privacy, reversibility, and data usability. Obfuscation differs from encryption, which requires a key to restore data; anonymization, which permanently prevents re-identification; and redaction, which permanently removes information. Successful implementation requires classifying data by sensitivity, selecting suitable techniques, defining consistent rules, combining obfuscation with controls such as auditing and access management, and regularly reviewing methods as data volumes, business needs, and security threats evolve.

Snowflake is phasing out single-factor password authentication, with MFA required by default for password sign-ins on accounts created after October 2024, enforcement expanding to human users without custom policies in April 2025, all human users in August 2025, and all human and service users by November 2025. These changes affect CData customers whose Snowflake connections use the Password authentication scheme, while users of key-pair authentication, OAuth, or other single sign-on methods are unaffected. CData products already support alternative authentication options, including RSA key-pair authentication, OAuth 2.0 through Snowflake security integrations, Okta, Azure AD, PingFederate, and SAML. Users are advised to replace password-based connections with one of these supported methods, with no product upgrade required for current CData versions.

Businesses seeking current, unified reporting can combine Salesforce CRM data and NetSuite financial and transactional data in Power BI, but native connectors, manual exports, and custom-built pipelines may limit real-time access and add cost, complexity, and errors. CData Connect AI is presented as a no-code integration platform that provides live connections to Salesforce, NetSuite, Power BI, and more than 250 other data sources, with enterprise-grade security and data-access management. In an example involving a global legal advocacy group, the platform enabled data from multiple systems to be consolidated into a Power BI dashboard, improving governance, accelerating reporting, and supporting more timely decision-making.

Reliable business intelligence depends heavily on “data plumbing,” the often time-consuming work of connecting, updating, formatting, and maintaining underlying data sources, which can consume much of the effort required to build dashboards and reports. Key challenges include stale data caused by limited refresh schedules, incompatible schemas and formats across systems, and fragile native or custom connectors that may have performance limits or break after API updates. The example of Advantage Investigations describes an HR dashboard that uses real-time payroll data, normalized schemas, and a connection to ADP to provide drill-down reporting for stakeholders. CData Connect AI is presented as a platform intended to address these issues by maintaining live connections, enabling users to define virtual data schemas compatible with tools such as Power BI, and reducing the need for ongoing connector maintenance.

CData Connect AI’s scheduled queries feature is designed to automate data flows into Smartsheet, addressing the need for users to keep projects updated with information from external systems without manual imports or custom integrations. The platform supports connections to more than 250 data sources and lets users define when and how data is synchronized, including information from finance, HR, ERP, CRM, analytics, logistics, and inventory systems. Suggested applications include updating project timelines and resource allocations, maintaining financial forecasts, importing sales pipeline data, centralizing operational dashboards, and tracking marketing campaign performance. By reducing repetitive updates and potential errors, the feature aims to provide teams with more current Smartsheet data, support collaboration and decision-making, and allow users to focus on higher-value work; CData also offers a 30-day free trial.