Get Greater Agility with Federated Data Governance
The latest IDMC enhancement gives teams power to implement data their way for better, faster results.
Successful organizations rely on effective data governance practices to ensure that high-quality, trusted data is available to users when needed. However, the distributed nature of data operations in modern enterprises presents challenges in maintaining consistency across the entire data landscape, which is often addressed by a centralized data governance model.
Federated data governance has emerged as a powerful solution for managing the complexity and diversity of data sources across multiple business domains. Informatica recently launched data governance capabilities that offer the flexibility and interoperability needed to support this federated approach.
What Is Federated Data Governance?
In a federated data governance model, policies and standards are defined at a central level, while local domain teams have the autonomy and resources to implement these in ways that best fit their specific environments. Under the federated model, governance authorities or teams within individual business units, such as finance or marketing, manage their own data assets and environments. Each team is responsible for governance within their specific data domain, ensuring compliance with central standards. The term "federated" refers to the model of smaller units operating with a degree of independence while executing the overall strategy of their organization.
The rise of distributed data environments, alongside an increasing number of data sources, has resulted in operations that cross various business units, departments and domains. Traditionally, data governance strategies emphasized centralized control over an organization’s data assets. These strategies often rely on strict data governance policies to ensure uniformity and compliance.
However, a devolved approach has become appealing to modern enterprises that manage large volumes of data and require the agility to respond quickly. A robust data governance program is essential to support this federated approach, enabling effective oversight and autonomy.
Collaboration in Federated Data Governance
Collaboration is essential for effective federated data governance. Autonomous domain teams work alongside centralized data governance functions to address everyone's data needs while aligning with the organization’s overall standards and strategy. This approach does not allow individual business units to conduct data governance in isolation; instead, it provides a framework that ensures consistent policies and standards while allowing business units to have greater control over their specific circumstances.
In a federated model, decentralized governance teams collaborate closely with their business units to enhance agility, while centralized governance minimizes duplicated efforts and guarantees standardization. This decentralized data governance approach empowers teams to tailor governance to their specific needs while maintaining overall coherence. A central data governance leader should facilitate collaboration to ensure cohesion throughout the organization.
Implementing Federated Data Governance with Informatica’s IDMC
Informatica’s data governance capabilities allow organizations to maintain consistency and coordination across multiple domains yet deploy policies and controls through a federated approach to data governance.
The Fall release of our Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ (IDMC) introduces new Data Governance and Privacy features that enhance data management and security for operations across multiple regions, business domains and partner platforms. These updates provide granular, federated control over data to streamline data operations on IDMC and beyond. Highlights include:
- Providing granular control over access to metadata in IDMC.
- Orchestrating data access in partner platforms like Databricks and Snowflake with policy pushdown
- Accelerating access to reliable and trustworthy data with a new data quality bundle for India-specific data types
Let’s unpack how these enhancements give business domains greater control over their data.
Granular Access Control for Metadata
Organizations want to catalog all their data and share it with the right users at the right time, but they equally want to ensure that access is appropriate for each user group. They need to set controls around what is seen by users within specific domains.
New metadata access control capabilities in Cloud Data Governance & Data Catalog (CDGC) and Cloud Data Marketplace (CDMP) allow for granular, attribute-based control and federated policy management, ensuring business domains have comprehensive control over their data. Informatica customers can catalog the entire data landscape and manage asset ownership securely at scale.
Metadata access control leverages IDMC user roles for easy and efficient control over metadata access in CDGC and CDMP. Governance teams can set granular controls for any asset of the metadata platform via asset-specific roles.
Benefits of metadata access control include:
- Reduce risk exposure from insider threats with policies enforced across IDMC (CDGC, CDMP).
- Faster time to value and minimal disruption of enterprise architecture and processes.
- Confidently open the data-consuming applications on IDMC (CDGC, CDMP, CLAIRE GPT) to your entire organization.
Informatica is committed to continuously expanding cloud ecosystem partnerships so customers can deploy data governance capabilities on their preferred cloud platform. CDGC is now generally available for Google Cloud and accessible to customers in North America and Saudi Arabia via Google Cloud Marketplace, with all EMEA following by November 30. Google Cloud users now have an easy way to discover data, measure data quality and document business ownership of data.
Control Access to Data Across Platforms
In complex organizations, different domains commonly use different data platforms. Maintaining overall consistency while implementing data governance within each business unit can be challenging.
As a cloud-neutral vendor, Informatica is uniquely positioned to provide universal, no-code policies that cross multi-cloud environments and ensure seamless and secure user experiences, all driven by IDMC’s common metadata platform.
IDMC empowers governance teams to quickly automate and enforce security and privacy controls directly within data platforms. The policy pushdown capability in Cloud Data Access Management (CDAM) orchestrates native controls in Snowflake and Databricks to simplify operations and make it easier for governance teams to scale secure access.
Benefits of policy pushdown include:
- Minimizing risk exposure with consistent controls across multiple data sources.
- Reducing time and cost to maintain access controls.
- Accelerating time to value and minimizing disruption of enterprise architecture and processes.
- Delivering appropriate and protected data in seamless, non-invasive user experiences.
Control Data Quality Across Regions
Domain experts are often best placed to monitor and maintain data quality for their assets. Cloud Data Quality (CDQ) supports domain-based governance teams by accommodating data types from specific industries.
Data quality bundles for industries or locations provide rules for validating common data types, helping governance teams support high-quality data usage and compliance with industry and geographic regulations. Organizations making use of these pre-built bundles can swiftly and effectively tackle data quality challenges, ensuring that their data is reliable and trustworthy.
The most recent data quality bundle for India covers PII and other crucial data elements, including Permanent Account Number (PAN), Aadhaar, Electors Photo Identification Card (EPIC) number, passport, driver’s license and more.
Benefits of data quality bundles include:
- Swiftly and effectively tackling data quality challenges, ensuring that their data is reliable and trustworthy.
- Improving the quality of data for greater utility and protection.
Take a Step Towards Federated Data Governance
Driving federated data governance within your data management platform and into the applications that use data can help your organization deliver appropriate data to users and applications for powerful next-generation initiatives like generative AI. For details on how the Informatica® Intelligent Data Management Cloud™ can advance your data and AI missions, contact us for more information about the Fall IDMC release.
