Wasn’t the cloud supposed to be the great simplifier?
Instead, most enterprises now juggle three (or more) clouds, petabytes of scattered data and sky-high AI ambitions—often with zero shared visibility across teams.
The result? Fragmented governance, mounting technical debt and migration projects that stall just when they should be accelerating innovation.
Fortunately, our new ebook, “Stop Flying Blind Through the Clouds,” offers a pragmatic flight plan out of the turbulence.
Download “Stop Flying Blind Through the Clouds”
The Cloud-AI inflection point
Every business unit is racing to modernize in the cloud, while AI is amplifying both opportunity and risk. Fragmented visibility, inconsistent controls and runaway data quality issues create a vicious cycle that creates:
- Blind spots that multiply as data spreads across platforms.
- Governance splinters as access rules, lineage and policies differ by system.
- Technical debt balloons when “lift-and-shift” becomes “lift-and-forget.”
These aren’t isolated headaches; they stem from one root cause—governance fragmentation—where control stays tethered to individual clouds and disconnected from the people who set policy or use the data.
Why most cloud migrations fall short
Most cloud migrations falter because business objectives and technical execution drift apart. Workloads lift and shift, but the KPIs that prove value remain stubbornly grounded, leaving leadership wondering where the promised ROI went.
Governance breakdowns compound the problem: control processes live in platform silos, creating pockets of inconsistent rules, fragmented visibility and—ultimately—chaos. Without a unified governance, each cloud becomes its own fiefdom.
Quick, one-time “lift-and-shift” projects often spawn data swamps. So what was messy on-prem simply re-appears in the cloud, only bigger and harder to navigate, undermining analytics and AI initiatives before they even start. Ownership gaps deepen the crisis. If business users can’t see or steward the data that powers their decisions, trust erodes, adoption stalls and migration momentum evaporates. Finally, AI magnifies every flaw. A single bad dataset that once spoiled a report can now cascade through models to misinform thousands of automated decisions, multiplying risk at machine speed.
Overcoming these pitfalls takes more than faster pipelines; it requires a unified governance program—one flexible enough to span every cloud, yet strong enough to embed quality, compliance and shared business context into everyday workflows
Enter Data Confidence™
At Collibra, we believe that confidence is fundamental to accelerating your organization. And we believe it’s critical to emphasize Data Confidence as a key outcome of unified governance.
So what is Data Confidence? It’s the feeling your people share when they can discover, trust and use data and the AI built on it without second-guessing quality or compliance. It happens only when governance becomes an enabler, not a bottleneck.
The four-step flight path for Data Confidence?
- Step 1: Define / refine the operating model & policy strategy: Map roles, codify policies and bake guardrails (e.g., end-to-end lineage) into every workflow. Clear ownership prevents re-work and scales safely
- Step 2: Discover & curate data across systems: Centralize metadata, lineage and classifications in a single catalog so scattered assets become certified, trustworthy data products
- Step 3: Assess data asset readiness & feasibility: Evaluate each dataset’s business value, platform fit, cost and dependencies to migrate what matters—and skip what doesn’t
- Step 4: Determine data quality health: Automate profiling, rules and continuous monitoring at (or before) migration so poor data never boards the plane, let alone trains your models.
Follow these steps and governance flips from bottleneck to booster, powering every data and AI initiative with confidence.
The payoff: Clear skies, competitive lift
With unified governance in place, teams stop hunting for data and start using it:
- Faster cloud ROI. No more costly do-overs.
- AI you can trust. Models train only on policy-approved data.
- Shared context. Business and technical users speak the same data language.
- Compliance by design. Controls travel with the data, not the platform.
That’s Data Confidence™ in action—and it scales with every new dataset, workload or AI use case you launch.
Ready for takeoff?
Don’t let fragmented governance keep you circling.
Download the ebook “Stop Flying Blind Through the Clouds” for the complete framework, checklists and real-world stories of organizations that turned cloud complexity into strategic lift.
See how Collibra’s unified governance platform frees your data from silos, unites business and technical users, and accelerates every data and AI initiative—safely.
