Informatica Axon Data Governance

Informatica Axon Data Governance provides browser-based, business level access to a variety of enterprise grade, highly automated and democratised data governance capabilities. These capabilities are tightly coupled with Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, Informatica Data Quality and Informatica Data Privacy Management (formerly Secure@Source), which operate downstream of Axon Data Governance but seamlessly integrate with it using shared metadata-driven intelligence, as well as CLAIRE, Informatica’s Enterprise Unified Metadata Intelligence Engine. Taken all together, these products offer a complete, unified, and intelligent solution for data governance.

Customer Quotes

“Having an automated, integrated solution from Informatica is making a difference in our data governance program – because you cannot manage what you cannot see.”
L.A. Care Health Plan

“Informatica helps us tackle data governance and management in new and more effective ways, giving us the tools to win more business and retain our existing customers.”
AIA Singapore.

Mutable Award: Gold 2020

Axon Data Governance allows you to view and manage a variety of business and data assets within a single location, including data sets, business terms, policies, processes, and so on. A contextual graph search is provided, as are automated workflows, approval processes, and a variety of dashboards at both the system and local levels (one of which is displayed in Figure 1).

Assets come equipped with a variety of information, notably including connections with your other assets. This includes explicit associations, applicable rules and policies, impact analysis, and data lineage. For policies, this also includes their position in your overall policy hierarchy. The product thus provides a connected view of your overall system. Relevant stakeholders are also highlighted, including both direct stakeholders as well as the broader stakeholder community, and discussion features are provided to facilitate collaboration. The product also offers a view into your technical metadata, held within Enterprise Data Catalog, and allows you to create data sets within Axon Data Governance directly from that metadata.

Fig 02 – System lineage view with data quality overlay in Informatica Axon Data Governance

Data lineage in Axon Data Governance is business-oriented and available at multiple levels. It is displayed visually, and can be filtered, explored, and so forth on the fly. You can also overlay a variety of metadata, such as data quality and risk, onto your lineage view. This is shown in Figure 2. Corresponding technical lineage is available within the Enterprise Data Catalog.

The product’s data discovery capabilities are quite extensive, leveraging CLAIRE to automatically sort your data into a variety of ‘Smart Domains’, a number of which are provided out of the box. CLAIRE can also be used for intelligent business term association, tagging relevant data assets with business terms based on data discovery rules equipped to each term, and thus connecting your business and technical assets.

For data quality, natural language processing is used via CLAIRE to automatically generate new (or recommend existing) data quality rules based on plain English descriptions of your quality requirements. Data quality checks are automated – in particular, newly ingested data is checked automatically – as is reporting. Several categories of data quality are also offered, allowing for nuanced quality measurements.

Several features are provided to support data privacy and regulatory compliance. In addition to the data discovery described above, the product offers sensitive data discovery and classification across structured and unstructured data, support for subject access requests, and the ability to track policy violations and understand and assess risk. Policies can be managed just as any other asset, and can also be associated to business terms and automatically enforced on correspondingly tagged data assets. Integration with Informatica Data Privacy Management also allows your policies to drive risk analysis and privacy monitoring (for example, alerting) inside Axon Data Governance.

Finally, Axon Data Governance provides data democratisation via Informatica Axon Data Marketplace, a new, embedded feature. The Axon Data Marketplace solution allows data owners to publish their data directly from Axon Data Governance, as well as manage and track access to it. For data consumers, it provides a means to search for data – which is organised into meaningful business categories – and request access to it centrally via a checkout process. Axon Data Marketplace also provides a significant degree of automation, automatically notifying data owners of incoming requests, checking requests against existing policies, and delivering the relevant data when a request is approved.

Axon Data Governance provides a notably broad set of data governance capabilities, which are extended even further by its integration with Enterprise Data Catalog and Data Privacy Management. What’s more, these capabilities are, in general, highly automated, often owing to shared metadata-driven intelligence and other functionality provided by CLAIRE. In effect, Informatica provides a complete and often intelligent solution for data governance.

In fact, separating out business concerns within Axon Data Governance from technical concerns in Enterprise Data Catalog and Data Privacy Management provides its own benefits, by offering experiences and views tailored specifically for business and technical users, respectively. The privacy compliance and risk monitoring provided by Informatica Data Privacy Management, and especially the ability to bring the results of that monitoring back into Axon Data Governance for consumption by your business users, is a particular strength.

Axon Data Marketplace also provides significant advantages. By acting as a centralised ‘one stop shop’ for data approval, it makes it much easier for data consumers to find and request access to the data they need. Likewise, the Axon Data Marketplace benefits data owners by providing a single location to manage access requests, by automating much of the approval process, and by automatically delivering data assets to your data consumers upon the completion of said process. In short, it makes the lives of your data owners and consumers simpler and easier, allowing them to spend more of their time and energy on other concerns, such as creating value from the data within your organisation.

The Bottom Line

Informatica Axon Data Governance is the keystone for Informatica’s intelligent data governance solution. Said solution is eminently integrated and complete, highly automated and scalable, and well worth your consideration.