Data Catalog

A Data Catalog Enables Organizations to Govern and Manage Data

A data catalog helps organizations govern and manage their critical data assets.  Data catalogs locate, analyze and create navigable intelligence on data identities, such as customer or product records.  Organizations can understand how, where and why data is used across their organizations. Data catalogs create rich sets of metadata on data entities to describe the data’s characteristics and utilization.

How are data catalogs used?

1. Identifying data sets for consolidation via master data management such as customer, partner, employee, product, or service information records stored on various systems.
2. Create a central record of all data assets for data governance programs.
3. Exploration of data by data scientists and analysts for analytic projects.
4. Provide insight to data management teams for data integration, consolidation, and migration projects.
5. Help IT teams understand the issues, challenges and support needed to migrate LoB and mission critical applications to SaaS/cloud.
6. Support internal and external audits related to privacy, security, and financial reporting.

What are the key functions of a data catalog?

1. Connect and discover data from various sources.
2. A business glossary defining data types.
3. Lineage information to understand the data’s provenance.
4. Collaboration/team features.
5. Exploration function of data from source to target.
6. Analysis and monitoring of adherence to data governance.
7. Google-like search capabilities of data assets.
8. Data context reporting.
9. Data protection/masking based on role-based access.

How is a data catalog important to privacy?

• It provides organizations intelligence of what data should be monitored for privacy risk, usage, and protection.
• Deep analysis of personal and sensitive data.