What is Shift Left?

Shift Left in data integration is derived from the software engineering principles of Shift Left Testing where tests are performed earlier in the software development lifecycle to improve quality of software, accelerate time to market, and identify issues earlier. Similarly, Shift Left in data integration is an approach where data processing and governance is performed closer to the source of data generation. By cleaning and processing the data earlier in the data lifecycle, all downstream consumers including cloud data warehouses, data lakes and lakehouses can share a single source of well-defined and well-formatted data. Shift Left provides consistent, reliable, and timely access to important business data where it is needed.

Shift left is an approach to process and govern data near the source and ingest fresh trustworthy data into any downstream consumers including data warehouses, data lakes and lakehouses.