Freddie Mac creates a one-stop-shop for data

Their approach to designing and implementing a modern cloud native ecosystem solution involved three steps. At the core of designing a well-governed data lake is the requirement that the new data ecosystem will deliver ongoing relevance and value creation. It should drive creativity, innovation, and reduce the time to market for new products.

The first requirement was alignment between the overarching organizational business objectives and those responsible for provisioning the data and implementing the data lake.

“We refreshed our data strategy, to ensure it aligns with our divisional business objectives, and with the departmental mission of a cloud native data strategy, because we were heavy users of Collibra already,” said Vikram. “Next, we built the cloud onboarding solution with Collibra in the front. And finally, we added integrations where we needed them so that the data pipelines are flowing smoothly and are optimized at every point.”

“Having a data strategy helps us communicate where we are going and why we are going there,” said Vikram. “The next step in our data transformation journey was to design the flow for the data lake hydration process that we pivoted on Collibra. Collibra has become a well-established data governance and metadata platform at Freddie Mac, the metadata from our legacy data platforms, data warehouses, data marts, applications in relational databases, as well as Hadoop is already integrated into Collibra. The technical metadata from these data sources is supplemented with business metadata, such as definitions, taxonomy, data classifications, data quality, and controls.”

They added custom workflows to increase the collaboration across teams and to keep the business metadata evergreen. They placed Collibra in front of the data lake onboarding process to leverage the existing metadata. Along with their new intake process they were able to accelerate the transformation to their new data information platform.

“The metadata, data classifications, and technical metadata from Collibra powers the access management engine and the data pipelines to hydrate our data lake,” said Vikram. “As the data lake gets hydrated with approved data sets, the data in the lake is already curated. It is ready for access and the metadata from S3 buckets, parquet files and Snowflake is available in Collibra for data consumers, universally.”

With the Collibra-based solution in place for a few months now, Freddie Mac has started to realize tremendous benefits from it. They have strengthened the business culture on the idea that data is a product, with value that the data information platform can deliver. They focus on adding features that their users will be able to use immediately.

They are developing new business capabilities with the innovations possible with a modern, agile delivery approach. By leveraging Collibra, they are accelerating the simplification of their data ecosystem, with a focus on business. The metadata, technical business, data quality controls, and even operational metadata is all available in Collibra.

“This promotes common understanding of data because this rich metadata is able to provide data consumers, a universal context on the data origination, its availability and how to get access to what data,” said Vikram. “Having an integrated business view of this rich content is very powerful and empowers our business users.”