For Structural Cloud accounts other than pay-as-you-go, Structural Cloud onboarding is a two-week process to allow you to become familiar with the application and to generate Structural processed data to use in a variety of workflows.
Here are the necessary steps and overall process that you complete with your designated Tonic Solutions Architect.
To ensure that you are ready to start onboarding, make sure that Structural Cloud can access your source data.
Depending on your data source type, you might need to:
Create a database user with read access
Configure profile permissions with your cloud provider
Make other configurations
The required setup is described in the documentation for the specific data connector. For a list of connectors, with links to the individual connector documentation, go to Data connector summary.
If your database only allows connections from allowlisted IP addresses, then you must allowlist Structural static IP addresses. For details, go to #data-connectors-allowlist-tonic-static-ips.
When you start the onboarding process, you should have a good idea of following topics:
Select the first datasets for Structural to process.
These datasets should reflect a full use case for the Structural data, such as a testing workflow or a developer experience.
You can use Structural to de-identify sensitive data and to subset data. You can also add Structural to your automation toolchain.
Your data also might have specific features that need special handling.
Decide what you want to focus on.
Depending on your database, Structural can write output to:
Destination database
Files
Container repository
Tonic Ephemeral
Select the output mode and prepare the destination.
De-identifying the data or creating a subset might need knowledge from the data users or database administrators.
Choose your teams and ensure that they are available.
For example, depending on your organization’s needs, the validation might be done by the data users or the security personnel.
Ensure that they are available.
After you meet the above requirements, it’s time to use Structural.
Here are the basic steps involved and expectations.
In the scoping requirements, we asked you to plan ahead:
The preferred datasets
The onboarding goals
During the first onboarding step, we finalize these plans.
After a Structural training session, you should be able to complete the configuration needed to produce a desensitized output dataset.
This involves:
Proper application of generators. For information about generators and how to apply them, go to Generators.
Any necessary subsetting. For information about subsetting in Structural, go to Subsetting data.
Other configuration
To find a suitable configuration, you usually must work with the end data users to fine tune the generator selections and subset configuration.
Determine the full processes and automation to ensure continued Structural value.
The Structural Cloud onboarding uses the following timeline:
Day 1 - Project kick-off call (30 minutes), Structural Cloud license activated
Day 2 - Product training (1 hour)
Day 4 - Progress meeting (30 minutes)
Day 9 - Progress meeting (30 minutes)
Day 12 - Project closing meeting (30 minutes)