12 top products for data governance stewardship
Alation, BackOffice Associates and Infomatica are among the leading providers in this space, according to a new report by Forrester Research.
12 leading products for data governance stewardship
Data scientists need help with managing data policies, complying with evolving regulations, and preparing for the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. To assist them, Forrester Research has released its latest Wave report – “Data Governance Stewardship and Discovery Providers, Q2 2017: The 12 Providers That Matter The Most and How They Stack Up.” The study is authored by Forrester analyst Henry Peyret, with assistance from Alex Cullen, Alex Kramer and Sam Bartlett. Here are 12 leading products they reviewed in the data governance and stewardship space.
Alation - Alation Enterprise Edition
“Alation provides a strong data catalog capability, focusing on supporting analytics and insight,” Peyret says. “A four-year-old company, Alation has positioned itself as an automated data catalog built for collaboration. The vendor provides customizable dashboards and alerts for data stewards. Its typical buyers are chief data officers, vice presidents of analytics or data science, and heads of data governance. Its clients are increasingly asking for more data governance capabilities.”
ALEX Solutions - ALEX Version 2.23 (2.24 RC1)
“ALEX Solutions provides a cloud-based data governance solution designed to support business and technical users,” according to Peyret. “Its key features are structured and unstructured data scanners, profiling, data usage tracking, and simple value and impact ratings. Its offering is able to automatically classify sensitive information and determine which users can access it based on their predefined roles.”
BackOffice Associates - Data Stewardship Platform 6.5
“BackOffice Associates is an enterprise information data governance and data stewardship solution provider that supports the data management journey from migration, archival, data quality, and analytics to data governance and master data management,” Peyret says. “It provides data scanners, data profiling, data quality, and collaboration, a basic but useful data valuation approach. Currently, BackOffice Associates is addressing new domains for data governance, including complex privacy governance as required by GDPR.”
Cloudera - Cloudera Enterprise 5.10
“Cloudera is designed to support Data Governance 2.0 with collaboration between technical and business users,” Peyret notes. “Its platform provides role-based access and preconfigured dashboards to support different user types. It offers robust support for tracking data governance issues by easily defining policies and determining which data sets are impacted and which events to trigger via the use of automated workflows.”
Collibra - Collibra Data Governance Center
“Collibra provides a configurable collaborative platform that is designed to meet the needs of 15 different user personas,” Peyret says. “Each user can configure their personal dashboard with the widgets they need. Collibra fits particularly well for data governance teams and chief digital officers. It supports the data governance capabilities needed for GDPR compliance. The catalog part of its offering expands the capabilities for data analysts/scientists to find, access, and collaborate on data sets, and the upcoming data profiling capability and visual exploration will enhance that support even more.”
DATUM – Information Value Management
“DATUM provides a cloud-based and on-premises data governance platform that evaluates the impact of data on processes,” Peyret explains. “Role-based access ensures that each user has visibility into the metrics and dashboards they need. The platform also focuses on enterprise collaboration to engage subject matter experts in data governance. With a background in services, DATUM offers an accelerator matrix to help customers reach value quickly.”
Global Data Excellence – DEMS (Data Excellence Management Systems)
“Global Data Excellence uses artificial intelligence and semantics to automate data governance, business excellence, and analytics,” Peyret says. “Global Data Excellence leverages advanced university research in semantic models and AI to automate numerous, currently painful manual tasks for DGSD. Its road map focuses on improving its UI for data visualization and enhancing its collaboration tools to support data sharing throughout an organization.”
Global IDs – Enterprise Information Management Software
“Global IDs focuses on data catalog features with some advanced capabilities for GDPR and data analysts and scientists,” Peyret says. “For GDPR, it can detect personally identifiable information and data that raises privacy concerns after multicolumn aggregation. It lacks data governance capabilities but could complement other tools such as Collibra. It is particularly interesting for large organizations because of its ability to treat millions of columns.”
IBM – InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog
“IBM is a recognized leader in executing data governance policies, with multiple products covering data quality, MDM, the data life cycle (with Optim), and security (with Guardium),” Peyret says. “In Q4 2014, IBM added a policy management capability called Stewardship Center based on its well-known Business Process Manager product, available on-premises or as a hosted offering. Stewardship Center enables users to create diverse policies, which are defined in natural language. IBM is moving toward a holistic governance model, which will allow users to view data across business systems and applications.”
Infogix – Data Governance Suite
“Infogix acquired Data3Sixty in early 2017 to expand its platform and offer support for policies, external and internal data stewards, collaboration, and external data source management,” Peyret explains. “It provides a customized view for each data steward that highlights every conversation or task for which they are responsible. Infogix also provides an out-of-the-box template for GDPR and is able to implement its solution in 30 to 60 days. It maintains a public product road map and leaves 20% of its capacity unplanned in order to rapidly meet customer demand for new functionality.”
Informatica – Enterprise Information Catalog / Informatica Axon
“Informatica acquired Diaku in early 2017 to expand its data governance and compliance capabilities,” Peyret says. “Informatica’s solution for data governance provides Enterprise Information Catalog (a metadata-driven repository), Axon for collaboration and graphical metrics (including for non-technical business users), Data Quality, and Secure@Source for security purposes.”
SAP – SAP Data Services 4.2 Enterprise Edition / SAP Information Lifecycle Management 1.0
“SAP provides information stewardship as part of its Enterprise Information Management solution, which includes capabilities such as master data governance and data quality,” Peyret explains. “SAP views data governance’s role as mainly to support process efficiency and report production accuracy. This is very much in line with Data Governance 1.0 objectives (100% data quality, data uniqueness, data availability for life cycle and compliance, and 100% data security) for the quality, uniqueness, life cycle, and security of data.”