Alex Solutions Data Governance

Alex Solutions is a platform that provides a range of metadata management capabilities, including data governance, data stewardship, data quality, data lineage, and data migration. It is available both in-cloud and on-premises (and in fact boasts a particularly strong strategy for the cloud) and strives to be ‘single, simple and social’ by providing a unified, enterprise-ready and technology agnostic platform that readily supports collaboration and is easy to use for both business and technical users.

Customer Quotes

“Alex has helped our governance and data stewardship implementation. We look forward to utilizing Alex more and to add more of its new scanners in the future.”
Energy Retailer

“The Scanner Orchestration User Interface is very good. The overall User Interface consistency was evident and important to support our continued role out across the bank.”
Retail Bank

“We were initially attracted to Alex for the metadata lineage feature, but as we explored further the overall visual interface and depth of features has continued to impress our entire team.”
Global Telco

Alex Solutions offers what it describes as autonomous, highly automated data governance. It uses intelligent scanners to automatically harvest, parse and ingest metadata across a wide range of metadata sources, including both structured and unstructured data. What’s more, a variety of prebuilt scanners are available in order to accommodate a wide range of third-party products, solutions and technologies. Your scanners will automatically leverage policy rules created within the platform to tag and/or create additional business context for any incoming metadata – for example, sensitive data could be identified as such – and you can also tag your data using AI-driven pattern recognition. What’s more, your intelligent scanners are available for configuration, execution and monitoring (of their health, performance and so on) through the Alex Hub, a centralised point of orchestration and control for the operation of the Alex platform (see Figure 1).

Fig 01 – The Alex Hub

The metadata you’ve ingested through your scanners is exposed within the Alex Data Marketplace, which effectively acts as both a data marketplace and as a data catalogue. It can be accessed either via exploration, assisted by configurable asset filters (‘facets’), or through both simple and advanced search capabilities. Notably, the marketplace provides a ‘map view’, that generates a graph visualisation of your data assets and the relationships between them. In this view, your assets can be grouped together by various properties, such as associated application or business domain, or drilled down into to see more detail. Workflows are supported, and can be initiated from within the marketplace itself. Finally, you’re able to ‘lock’ a selection of assets, enabling you to search through, explore and drill into that content specifically. A business glossary capability is also available as part of the Alex platform. This acts as a way to define, explore and discuss your business terms, and includes commenting and other collaborative capabilities. In addition, it allows you to associate your business terms with the broader contents of your data marketplace.

All of the above – in fact, the whole of the Alex platform – is underpinned by AI and machine learning capabilities, which contribute to the autonomous nature of the product. For example, machine learning is used to generate suggested associations and classifications for your data assets and business terms.  You’re then invited to approve or reject these suggestions, and this (as well as other feedback) is fed back into the product’s machine learning model, thus improving future predictions and recommendations.

Fig 02 – Data lineage within the Alex platform

Alex Solutions also promotes and supports a cloud-first strategy: the platform’s intelligent scanners can collect metadata from cloud platforms, as well as data catalogues that sit within the cloud; it can leverage cloud platforms and capabilities during deployment; and we are told that it will soon be available through various cloud marketplaces. The former capability, in particular, allows the platform to provide a centralised view of all of your metadata, even across multiple clouds and (cloud) data catalogues.

Other capabilities offered by the product include automated data quality and data security, as well as real-time, cross-system, visualised data lineage and impact analysis (see Figure 2).

Alex Solutions performs well in a number of areas that are important for data governance, including ease of use, automation, collaboration, and breadth of capability. The emphasis it places on automation is particularly useful, and is noticeable throughout the platform, but especially within its intelligent scanners and machine learning capabilities. In fact, its scanners are very impressive in general, due to the aforementioned automation as well as the fact that they are centrally managed (via the Alex Hub) and highly integrable (both in terms of metadata sources and third-party technologies). The ability for your scanners to either deterministically or intelligently tag incoming metadata is also notable. The platform also offers a significant degree of scalability, and is able to operate at enterprise scale.

The Bottom Line

Alex Solutions offers a highly autonomous and scalable metadata management platform that is compatible with the cloud as well as a wide range of both (meta)data sources and third-party products. These qualities – among others – make it very suitable for consolidating, managing and exposing all of your metadata within a single location: in short, for data governance.