Becoming Data-Driven with Data Catalog

In this post you will learn about Data Catalog. What is the data catalog? Why do you need one and how can it benefit your organization to become data-driven?

Lets start with some context first:

The data landscape is growing and changing rapidly.

Data explosion in volume & variety

As we all know our data landscapes are getting more and more complex day by day the volume and variety of data coming from inside and outside your organization is increasing exponentially.

Self-service analytics

Your business users are requesting an easy way to consume data for their business needs.

Risk of non-compliance

At the same time there is this concern of data security and safety and there’s a need to stick to data compliance standards.

Cloud migrations

Many organizations are moving to cloud-based infrastructure which is driving many applications to be deployed as services which leads to more and more fragmentation and spread of data.

How to turn your dark data into a valuable asset?

So to bring value to your operational and analytical systems and your consumers to accomplish this you need to:

Classify your data

A way to categorize and classify all your data automatically at scale without any tedious manual work

Know more about your data

You need to develop a good understanding of your data and its relationships and basically you need to get to know your data as you would know people within your social network

Share your data knowledge

You should be able to share this knowledge in a compliant manner with everyone in your organization who needs this information so to do this effectively you need an intelligent data cataloging system.

How can a data catalog help your organization?

So how does the data catalog help your organization?

Self-service discovery for Analytics

A catalog promote self service by helping users to find the right data required for their analysis

Data Governance

For data governance, a catalog can provide that ground truth and it reflects the presence use and quality of the physical data in your data landscape in a way that’s understandable to your business users and

IT Impact Analysis

For IT operations, a catalog can show all data dependencies and help IT users to understand the impact of any changes that they are planning

What features an Enterprise Data Catalog provides?

So now let’s talk about the typical features of an enterprise data catalog. Enterprise data catalog is built ground up for scale to support even the most complex of your data environments it has built in machine learning to automate and simplify the collection and classification of metadata it has some unique capabilities:

Search & Discovery

Most of the tools offer an intuitive interface which makes it easy for non-technical users to search and discover and explore data assets across the enterprise.

Broad Connectivity

These tools offer the broad universal connectivity for all the systems/applications and BI/DBs across your environment.

Open APIs

Theses tools also have open REST APIs which makes it easy for users to enter the catalog content in any application of their choice as you can tell it offers the most comprehensive metadata solution for your enterprise.

What is the need for a Data Catalog?

Now let’s discuss how does it help various users in your organization:

Data Governance Office

If you’re part of the data governance office with the data catalog you can validate and impose data governance policies and definitions

Data Consumer

Data consumer can discover, understand and trust data required for your analysis.

Data Steward

You can manage metadata for key enterprise data acids and you can manage data quality through the others life-cycle.

Data Owner

As a data owner you can ensure the data managed within applications and processes deliver value to the business.

Data Architect

As a data architect you can make sure IT enables business to discover data assets within verify data quality and trace-ability as you can tell our data catalog can benefit both business and IT users.

References:

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