Alation Data Governance App accelerates data governance using ML and AI

Alation announced the release and general availability of the company’s Data Governance App. The new app delivers autonomous, continual data governance using machine learning and AI (artificial intelligence). The Alation Data Governance App enhances data governance capabilities for the Snowflake Data Cloud.

Data governance is fundamental at any organization to ensure the quality, compliance, and protection of data. Yet data governance initiatives regularly fail due to the time and manual effort required for effective data operations. The Alation Data Governance App supports enterprises on their data governance journey with its people-centric approach. It utilizes machine learning and automation to accelerate and scale data governance while removing the drudgery of data stewardship processes.

The new app was created with multi-cloud customers in mind. The built-in integration for Snowflake allows joint customers to centrally manage data policies, protected data assets, and policy compliance in one single pane-of-glass view. The integration enhances transparency with data controls, and links those controls to policies in Snowflake. This is critical to maintaining industry compliance and auditability standards.

The Data Governance App includes:

• Centralized Policy Center that automates policy control and management and data policy synchronization. Policies can be applied and enforced on data at the time of use, helping meet security and compliance objectives.
• New Change Management Workflow that provides a robust and easy-to-configure process to ensure subject matter experts review and approve catalog changes.
• New Governance Dashboards that monitor and measure the progress of data governance programs and provide insight into curation progress, policy compliance, and open governance tasks.
• Updated Stewardship Workbench that automates stewardship activities by updating and curating catalog metadata in bulk via the user interface.

To accelerate the success of a customer’s data governance journey, Alation has released a data governance course and certification through Alation University, as well as a professional services offering. The offering serves as a blueprint for data governance and also extends the platform to solve broader data management issues by integrating with best-of-breed solutions.

“For organizations to drive data culture, they have to get data right — make it trustworthy, protected, and compliant,” said Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder, Alation. “Alation has reinvented the way organizations approach data governance by starting with people and leveraging the best technology to back into the most efficient and effective processes possible.”

“Alation has enabled Texas Mutual Insurance Company to move to the cloud with transparency and trust. Trust in data leads to greater confidence and better decision-making,” said Anthony Seraphim, Vice President of Data Governance, Texas Mutual Insurance Company. “What’s exciting about Alation’s Data Governance App is that it centralizes and automates key governance capabilities like policy management, helping organizations expedite their data governance efforts.”

“Data governance is changing in organizations. The typical command-and-control approach fails precisely because it leaves individuals frustrated and disengaged,” said David Menninger, SVP & Research Director, Ventana Research. “Alation’s Data Governance App allows organizations to change the way they think about data governance, enabling better data use and automating governance processes to support a DataOps approach.”

Support for EDM standards

In addition to the Data Governance App launch, Alation and Snowflake partnered to be the first companies to achieve the new Cloud Data Management Capabilities (CDMC) standard, which is sponsored by the EDM Council and verified by KPMG. The EDM Council creates data standards and defines capabilities for the financial services industry, among others. The Alation Data Catalog and Data Governance App, combined with the Snowflake Data Cloud, have completed the assessment of the CDMC 14 Key Controls & Automation, which define management practices for sensitive data in the cloud.

“Alation’s integration with Snowflake will help financial services customers accelerate their move to the cloud. And Alation’s Data Governance App accelerates compliance with emerging CDMC standards. With the built-in integration for Snowflake, users now have a single view into policies regardless of where they were created – in Snowflake or Alation. This is invaluable because it connects enterprise data policies to create end-to-end transparency and auditability for data,” said Matt Glickman, VP Customer Product Strategy, Data Marketplace, Financial Services, Snowflake.