Governed Data Discovery

What is Governed Data Discovery?

Governed data discovery delivers enterprise features necessary for achieving both data governance and speed of delivery within the same platform or application. It enables users to access secure and credible data for analysis.

Governed data is information that is centralized, secured, deployed and managed by a governing department, usually IT department, before users access it to ensure data integrity and security. Data governance tools include auditing, authorization, and authentication.

The key benefits of governed data discovery include:

• Faster insights: By empowering business teams to prepare, combine, and analyze data themselves, time-to-insight is greatly reduced compared to relying solely on overburdened IT resources.
• Alignment through trusted data: Common data definitions, metrics, and reference data enforced through governance models ensure various business units are using data consistently, avoiding conflicting insights.
• Reduced risk: Security protocols, access controls, and data anonymization rules help ensure sensitive data stays protected when access is democratized across an organization.

Challenges to governed data discovery include:

• Data literacy gaps: Not all employees may have the skills to take full advantage of self-service data access which could lead to misinterpretation.
• Tool sprawl: Loosely governed discovery may lead to unused tools and wasted spend along with ungoverned spreadsheets.
• Compliance challenges: Discovery may enable access to data that should remain restricted without adequate governance.

Governed data discovery is critical in the following common scenarios:

• Embedded analytics for SaaS applications: Users across multi-tenant SaaS applications can slice data to uncover insights and opportunities custom to each tenant.
• Exploratory analysis: Data scientists can investigate various datasets to determine analytical feasibility before formal modeling.

With the acceleration of data analytics across organizations, implementing responsible, governed data discovery is imperative to maximize value while minimizing risk. The keys are enabling flexibility and agility without compromising security, consistency or oversight.