Businesses need the data catalog as it allows them to create a seamless way for the employees to access and store data and other business assets in a systematic and organized way. Looking at the value that this type of data-driven insight will provide, the reason organizations need the gartner data catalog must become quite clearer.
The fragmented data environments will make data governance one big challenge as data analysts, business stakeholders, and other users cannot discover data and run queries over the whole data set. It reduces the data value as an asset.
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Important capabilities of the data catalog
All data catalogs aren’t made equally, thus it is very important to understand what capabilities they need to search look for when choosing the data catalog. In order, to make it simple for you, let look at the list of important capabilities for the data catalog:
Deploy over an enterprise
The strategically deployed catalogs have more value than the tactically deployed catalogs as they will catalog sources over the enterprise, therefore eliminating the creation of the metadata silos.
Documents data catalog policies
Managing a remote workforce means creating new risks and challenges. Do employees have remote access to important systems? Are they aware of the work-from-home business policies are? Can they handle important and sensitive data? The data catalog having self-service access can serve up the right procedures and policies.
Embedded data governance & privacy
Make sure trust, confidence, and compliance in the data by enforcing and operationalizing policies that control the user access thus you know that the right people can only use your data.
Makes data and usable
Open your company’s data door, and making it simple to access and understand the information assets. The data catalog is a core of analysis for the decision-making, thus automating its access and curation with an associated business context can allow stakeholders to spend a little more time to analyze it for the meaningful insights that they may put in action.
Data assets have to be rightly documented, scanned, tagged as well as annotated with the definitions, ownership, usage, and lineage. Automating data cataloging assets saves development time & streamlines ongoing governance and maintenance.
What’s Needed to Use Data in the Data Catalog?
Let us take one step back and explain metadata to people who may not be completely familiar with this. What’s metadata? There’re three types of metadata:
- Business metadata: It is the business knowledge that the users have about an asset in an organization. It includes business descriptions, annotations, comments, ratings, and mu h more.
- Technical metadata: It includes schemas, columns, tables, report names, file names, and more – anything documented in a source system
- Operational metadata: What time the object was refreshed? How many times the table was accessed by the users, which ETL job made it? And more?
Data catalog can help in many ways:
- Save money by productivity gains & improved data assets.
- Improve data quality for better business decisions.
- Save time—in delivering a higher number of data projects and 30% lesser time.
- Decrease data risk with improved compliance for the GDPR and PII.
- Improve the culture of data for the higher quality retention data professionals.
- Decrease dependencies & save the IT team’s time just by allowing self-service access.
In the past few years, we have seen a kind of mini-revolution over how we use this important metadata. Earlier, metadata was mainly used for lineage, audit, as well as reporting only. However, now the technological innovations such as graph databases, serverless processing, and new and accessible machine learning and AI techniques are pushing more boundaries & making it achievable with the metadata that just was not possible at such scale earlier.
Final Words
Remember your data users are the normal people like you and me and comprise of both technical & non-technical users. You need to know their respective requirements and challenges and create a data culture that can support data teams as well as help them to succeed. Thus, if you’re looking for the true enterprise-scale data catalog and offer metadata foundation for your data-driven enterprise priorities, you have a limited choice of catalog that will set you back for lost efficiencies, time, and effectiveness.
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