Cloud platforms offer unified scalable access to data and analytics. High performance at a significantly lower cost is a cornerstone of platforms like BigQuery. They also present unlimited computing power to adopt machine learning and sophisticated analytics. Gartner Research recommends cloud-first for businesses to transform, differentiate and gain a competitive advantage.
Moving data to the cloud
While these platforms simplify cloud migration with good tools, organizations still need to work on unlocking the potential value of data. They want to democratize data by creating a “data shopping” experience similar to that of online shopping. Organizations need to enable their teams to search, sort, filter, compare, choose data sets and request access both compliantly and securely.
Behind the scene, this experience translates to four challenges:
- Data discovery and understanding
- Data quality and observation
- Data ownership
- Compliant access
The traditional lift-and-shift approach does not work to solve these challenges when you migrate to BigQuery. However, Collibra offers BigQuery customers a 3-step approach that leverages data governance and data quality for compliant access to data and analytics in the cloud.
- Data source registration to get a complete understanding of the enterprise data
- Governed ingestion and transformation to build context and identify sensitive data
- Governed catalog for the data lake to enable policy-driven access to sensitive data
You can get more details of this cloud migration approach in the white paper from Collibra and Google Cloud, Three key steps for successfully moving to the cloud.
Identifying and protecting sensitive data
One of the central challenges in data shopping is controlling the access and use of sensitive data. Data privacy and protection regulations have strict mandates about sensitive data classes such as PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and PHI (Protected Health Information). These requirements put organizations in a delicate situation. If you impose too much control over the use of sensitive data, you lose the opportunity to extract value from it. But you also want to maximize the ubiquitous data access of cloud platforms like BigQuery.
Enabling compliant access to protected data proves to be the best strategy to achieve this balance. Identifying protected data, assigning ownership, and controlling access to data sets by roles assure that you don’t lose the intrinsic value of sensitive data.
Data governance plays a vital role in the process:
- Helping identify protected data classes, such as PII and PHI
- Assigning data ownership
- Establishing enterprise-wide policies about data usage
- Enabling workflows for access requests
Systemizing your enterprise data assets while moving to the cloud prepares them for compliant use.
Collibra enables compliant data shopping
After a successful cloud migration, Collibra helps build a governed catalog of data with the full context, ownership, lineage, quality and usage policies.
With Collibra data governance, you can create policies about data usage and data retention. Mapping these policies to data ensures that data always gets used with the associated policies. If the source data contains any PII, it can be recognized and de-identified to make it privacy-compliant. Collibra provides more than 40 standard formats for automatically identifying sensitive data. You can add more or customize them to match your requirements.
Operationalizing data governance workflows and processes with Collibra delivers at two levels:
- Escalating data quality issues to the right data owners for a streamlined privacy compliance process
- Establishing enterprise-wide policies and mapping them to protected data classes for access control
Collibra empowers your data consumers to shop for data from the governed catalog in BigQuery. They can run analytics in BigQuery and offer their reports for reuse. The bidirectional integration between BigQuery and Collibra ensures continuous synchronization of data assets, making them quickly available for shopping.
Streamlining the data shopping experience with Collibra enables data consumers to:
- Discover what data is available
- Understand its context, including definitions of key business terms and metrics
- Compare and choose data while noting the protected data classes
- Request access to data
Compliant data shopping with Collibra and BigQuery unlocks the value of enterprise data assets in the cloud.
