Informatica previews cloud data governance and catalog service

By Rebecca Stone

What did Informatica preview?

On July 13, Informatica previewed its Cloud Data Governance and Catalog service. The company expects general availability later in the quarter.

The service will operate within Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), which Informatica introduced in April. IDMC supplies the services an organization needs to use data effectively in business operations. Its portfolio includes master data management (management of authoritative shared records), analytics, business intelligence (systems for reporting and decision analysis) and artificial intelligence (systems performing tasks normally requiring human intelligence).

Cloud Data Governance and Catalog adds governance controls and a data catalog, an inventory of organizational data, to that platform. This extends Informatica's established on-premises portfolio into cloud deployments.

Why did Informatica build it?

Nucleus Research analyst Daniel Elman said the service could strengthen Informatica's position in data management and integration. He said demand for governance controls is growing as analytics and data integration become leading IT priorities worldwide. The pandemic accelerated that demand, according to Elman. Distributed teams needed agile digital tools to collaborate at scale on data analysis, management and integration projects. Those tools also needed to preserve centralized control and accountability.

“Demand for these capabilities is only set to increase, as the majority of companies are very early on in deploying modern enterprise data management frameworks and strategies,” Elman said.

How does it apply to machine learning?

Machine learning (systems that learn patterns from data) trains on data that organizations often struggle to understand and control. Hyoun Park, CEO and chief analyst at Amalgam Insights, identified handoffs between the point where teams find data and the point where they create a machine-learning output. Those handoffs create compliance, governance, security and trust problems, Park said.

“Informatica is providing more stringent governance to reduce the black box mysteries of machine learning and create more transparency not only to where the data comes from, but how it is being used, and how data sources change over time as their use for analytics and machine learning changes,” Park said.

That approach addresses opaque stages between data discovery and analytical output. It increases transparency into where data originates, how it is used and how sources change over time.

How does the cloud catalog differ?

David Corrigan, Informatica's general manager for data governance, quality and privacy, described the new cloud catalog service as an evolution of the company's established on-premises platform for enterprise data management. The vendor already offers Enterprise Data Catalog in its product portfolio. The cloud service gains tighter integration with other IDMC services and supplies a common layer for data profiling (inspection of data quality), administration and metadata (information describing other data).

Cloud providers already offer native catalog services:

• Amazon: AWS Glue data catalog.
• Microsoft: Azure Data Catalog.
• Google: Data Catalog.

Corrigan said Informatica's service can enable a “catalog of catalogs,” a unified index spanning multiple catalogs. The design gives organizations using multiple cloud providers a more complete view of available data. It targets multi-cloud deployments, where data is spread across several cloud providers.

What carries over from Axon?

Informatica's established on-premises governance technology carries the Axon Data Governance name. The new cloud offering does more than reproduce those capabilities in cloud software, Corrigan said. It integrates governance more tightly with the data catalog.

Data lineage (the origin and transformation path of data) forms a core capability of the service. It helps users determine where data came from and how it changed before use. Informatica acquired Compact Solutions in July 2020, adding metadata management and data-scanning functions to its technology portfolio.

“As clients are bringing together data from all over the place into a central system like a data lake, the questions of how did the data get there, what was it joined with and how was it transformed are becoming more important,” Corrigan said. He added that organizations face greater difficulty answering those questions as data moves among more sources.