The rapidly evolving information age sees companies worldwide rely on data to power their digital transformation journeys for more efficient production cycles and outstanding customer relations.
However, organizations of all sizes produce data at an unprecedented scale. Inaccurate data can cause problems at every stage, whereas slow data pipelines risk your company losing out on reaching your prospects before your competitors.
Data governance tools can automate several processes to help you secure your data and manage it systematically for rapid deployment so that you can stay one step ahead of the competition.
Read on to learn more about data governance and the seven best data governance tools that promote superior data management strategies.
What is Data Governance?
Data governance is the practice and set of policies to create internal standards that dictate the proper methods of acquiring, managing, storing, using, and disposing of data.
Data governance aims to provide information to the correct users instantly securely. It is also used to identify the necessary protocol and the supporting technologies required throughout the data lifecycle for data and promote effective digital transformation journeys.
Data governance goes beyond the internal workings of an organization to meet external standards set by agencies and stakeholders from different industries for better data privacy, collaboration, and compliance.
You can also view data governance as being similar to master data management (MDM) since both disciplines are ultimately concerned with the proper administration of data across its lifecycle.
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Why is Data Governance Important?
With the ever-increasing amount of data, organizations of all sizes need a robust data governance strategy. Most organizations use data governance for increased protection and security. But policies often interfere with instant data access, resulting in slower time-to-market.
Data governance processes are wrongly associated with larger organizations, where managing complex data architectures takes precedence over agility, scalability, and speed. The truth is that data governance is vital for organizations of all sizes.
Smaller organizations have resorted to little or no data governance policies to reach the market quickly. Startups especially have prioritized speed over data security, architecture, and stable data pipelines.
Your organization needs data governance that provides reliable data to authorized users so that you can make informed business decisions as quickly as possible and drive up revenue and customer satisfaction.
Data governance provides the correct data to the trusted personnel, reinforcing data confidence with proper democratization within the organization and safeguarding classified information from malicious third parties.
Sloppy data practices can cause problems that reach down to different stages of your organization. Whether you’re a 200-person or a 2000-person organization, you need data governance tools to maintain stable and accurate data pipelines.
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What are Data Governance Tools, and Why You Need Them
Organizations often have difficulty implementing a proper data governance policy based on their personalized requirements and architecture. Companies turn to data governance tools to reduce the resources and time needed to carry out manual processes.
Data governance tools like Syncari provides workflow automation and data management solutions across disparate systems. These tools help safeguard your data, maintain high-quality data, and optimize master data management.
Here are the key advantages the automation provided by data governance tools brings to your organization:
- Data governance tools work alongside data cleansing processes to improve data quality based on specified guidelines to help inform business decisions with access to consistently accurate data.
- Data governance tools help you comply with industry-specific regulations while upholding security and privacy.
- Effective data governance processes created with automation tools lead to significantly increased revenue thanks to improved data practices and protocols that optimize workflows from the inventory to the customer.
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Top 7 Data Governance Tools
Now that you understand how data governance tools can improve the quality and efficiency of data your organization works with, it is time to look at the seven best services in the market:
1. Syncari
Syncari is a cloud-based data automation and synchronization platform that enables organizations to maintain high-quality data and uphold centralized data governance. We rely on AI and ML algorithms to automate data management and create efficient workflows.
What sets Syncari apart is our patented stateful sync which ensures data across disparate data warehouses and systems reflect the same way. We created a no-code multi-directional sync engine to provide companies with cleaner data to work with.
iPaaS tools such as Zapier are relatively unwieldy for data governance because they operate on a simple copy-and-paste function for records and fields, which means they cannot scale stable data pipelines in growing organizations.
Unlike stateless integration and data governance tools, Syncari’s patent-protected stateful sync unifies data across varied locations to manage records and automate the manual aspects of data governance by capturing business logic.
Our stateful sync also provides you control over data authority, manages deletions, and performs universal dedupe and merge programs. It is one of our key features to maintain data integrity by detecting and resolving data conflicts automatically.
You can create and automate custom data workflows with Syncari’s workflow automation based on your personalized business requirements using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface so that users of any technical expertise can perform data modeling effortlessly.
Workflows can be designed to trigger during certain events or configured to conditional logic, where businesses can define complex rules to assign a particular action based on specific conditions.
Users can also define the course of action for workflows if it encounters an error through our built-in error-handling feature. Workflow automation frees businesses to invest time and resources in higher-value tasks instead of manual data-related tasks.
Syncari unifies cross-functional data across systems and gives you complete control of the data flow for greater data governance by enabling you to choose a system as a “source of truth.” Intelligent data matching merges records to eliminate any duplicate data.
You can try out our features risk-free with a free trial or book a demo to create scalable data pipelines with a data management suite ranked #5, according to G2.
2. Talend Data Fabric
Talend Data Fabric combines data integration, integrity, and governance into a single platform alongside an application and API integration module integration. Talend’s data governance tool ensures clean data through automated quality checks and data quality features.
Talend reinforces data confidence by relying on its proprietary Talend Trust Score to calculate the reliability of your datasets at any point in time throughout the data lifecycle. Data catalog and data inventory automatically manage and enrich your metadata.
Talend Data Fabric includes self-service data preparation and curation to share curated datasets, data lineage tracing, and data democratization to safeguard data from unauthorized access.
3. Informatica Axon
Informatica Axon is a data governance and compliance solutions platform that quickly gives access to curated data for both business and IT teams to promote better collaboration.
Informatica Axon can be implemented into your existing cloud architecture or deployed on-premise to validate the data accuracy in different warehouses and across the cloud platform to create a data catalog.
Data governance solutions include lineage tracking, migration tracking, and automated data quality calculation to ensure your information is updated while complying with GDPR.
4. Collibra
Collibra is a data intelligence cloud platform whose data governance tool aims to automate data-related tasks while providing organizations with trusted data. It helps optimize governance processes and define assets to understand your data better.
Collibra comes with a business glossary feature to define business terms and a data dictionary for metadata documentation to set protocols for their use. These features are a searchable record for users to understand the usage and storage of data.
Data stewardship enables users to assign roles to authorized stewards for better data security.
5. Ataccama One
Ataccama One is an all-in-one data management and governance solutions platform that relies on AI technology to automate data administration. Ataccama One can be installed on the cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments to improve data quality.
Data professionals can run MDM functions and other processes on a single platform while automatically enforcing regulations on all data assets. Ataccama One provides features like data catalogs for big data platforms and data lake environments.
Ataccama One also hosts a data processing engine to help with digital transformations, record matching, and defining business rules.
6. IBM Cloud Pak for Data
IBM Cloud Pak for Data is a cloud-based platform that relies on AI technology to conduct data discovery, profiling, and cataloging. IBM Cloud Pak for Data offers solutions for data governance and quality management.
The IBM data governance tool includes privacy and security features like metadata enrichment, data lineage functions, and policy management to improve data protection and meet compliance standards.
IBM Cloud Pak for Data can be deployed on the cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments to create protocols for different roles within the organization and keep sensitive data away from unauthorized viewers.
7. Alation Data Catalog
Alation Data Catalog was initially launched as a platform for organizations to provide access to stored data efficiently. They have since branched out to create a data governance tool to provide organizations with reliable data through any environment.
Through a single point of reference, Alation Data Catalog allows users to search, understand, and govern data without coding. The service uses Machine Learning to index data across databases, data lakes, and file systems.
Alation Data Catalog lets you create and map governance policies to specific data assets.
Conclusion
Your organization relies on a mountain of data to carry out its daily workflows and ensure customer satisfaction to acquire more revenue and reputation. A lack of clean and reliable data can harm your company’s efficiency, leading to a significant resource drain.
Data governance tools like Syncari ensure your data stays accurate throughout your various systems. Your data needs to be safeguarded and reach the correct parties for them to utilize it effectively.
We help you achieve that through automation and a powerful sync engine to help you manage data and democratize it throughout your organization for optimal performance. Book a demo to feel the difference data governance can have on your company.
