Data catalog:
The foundation of unified governance

A data catalog creates and maintains an inventory of your organization’s data assets across your entire digital environment. It enables the discovery, description and organization of data assets.Data catalogs do this by leveraging metadata.

Most importantly, the modern data catalog serves as the architectural foundation for unified governance, providing the crucial layer for joining technical capabilities and business value. By transforming raw metadata into actionable intelligence, data catalogs create a dynamic knowledge network that grows more valuable with every interaction.

Why is a data catalog important?

Delivers end-to-end visibility: A data catalog provides a comprehensive view of your data assets, showing where they come from, how they transform and where they’re consumed as well as providing useful business context
Maximizes the value of your data: Your biggest opportunity is in the data you already manage. A data catalog helps organizations go from drowning in data to charting a path to unified governance Use cases

Choosing a data catalog

Look for these capabilities when considering a data catalog:

Connectors: Make sure your data catalog offers a centralized repository of connectors to your most widely and actively used data sources. This ensures your catalog is as comprehensive as possible
Curation: Make sure your data catalog offers tagging, grouping and documentation: to improve data discoverability and understanding. Tagging can help users quickly find related datasets, grouping can categorize data and documentation provides context and clarity
Automated classification: Automation accelerates and drives efficiencies in classifying ingested data, eliminating error-prone manual efforts and enhancing accuracy
Collaboration tools: An important element for operationalizing your data catalog is the capacity for users to communicate and interact with each other within the data context by sharing comments, annotations and shared insights. This can foster a more collaborative data culture, which is key for adoption
Data marketplace: A distinguishing capability for enterprise data catalogs, a data marketplace is a platform where users at all levels can ‘shop’ for datasets easily, helping them discover, share and collaborate around data

Use case by role

Marketing analytics: A marketer can use the catalog to find reports related to customer behavior, leading to more informed campaign strategies.

Supply chain optimization: Managers can locate data on suppliers, inventory levels, and transportation and build dashboards, leading to a more efficient supply chain.

Data science: Data scientists looking for datasets to use as training data for an AI model can leverage a data catalog to find relevant data.

Use case by industry

Healthcare: Hospitals and healthcare providers can use catalogs to track patient data, treatment histories and outcomes for improved patient care.

Finance: Banks and financial institutions can track transactions, customer interactions and market data to build AI-based predictive analytics leading to better risk management and customer service,

Government: Agencies can streamline the management of vast public records, creating comprehensive repositories that organize the inventory of datasets, track usage and secure access.