20 Data Governance Tools to Know

Every day, companies gather and generate enormous amounts of data, which is difficult to utilize effectively. That’s why it’s important to have a data governance strategy — a set of internal policies to help organizations understand what their data is, where it is and how best to use it.

Data governance is a critical component of any data management protocol. By establishing and enforcing clear procedures for handling their data, companies can not only keep up with the rapidly expanding list of data privacy and usage legislation, but also adopt new, data-intensive technologies like generative AI and chatbots more effectively and responsibly.

Data governance tools automate various aspects of the data governance framework, from creating data catalogs and business glossaries to mapping data relationships. They help ensure that data is accurate, compliant, secure and accessible at the right time by the right people throughout the business.

Below we look at 20 of the most popular data governance tools, covering their key features and use cases.

More on Data and AIHow Generative AI Will Empower Self-Service Data Management

20 Data Governance Tools

IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Built on data fabric technology, IBM Cloud Pak for Data enables organizations to access, update and unify all of their disparate data assets across all data types and cloud providers, including IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Its auto-catalog feature continuously discovers new data assets, analyzing and organizing them into class, type and format. And its auto privacy feature can be used to redact all of the sensitive, personal information tied to that data at once, as well create a list of authorized users who can access this information. The software also has metadata enrichment, data quality management and data virtualization functions, allowing users to understand and visualize all of their disparate data without having to move it around or replicate it.

Key Features

• Provides automated assessments of specific data privacy risks, along with mitigation recommendations.
• Can be deployed in the cloud, on-premises and in hybrid environments.
• Automates AI governance, helping to ensure that companies deploy their AI products safely.

Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management

Oracle Enterprise Metadata Management allows organizations to harvest, catalog and govern their metadata from relational databases, data warehouses, business intelligence platforms and other data sources — and all in both Oracle and other third-party systems. The tool also has an interactive search feature that can be used to further explore metadata and visualize metadata, as well as a set of collaborative tools to enable users to annotate and tag metadata, add comments and create internal review boards. 

Key Features

• Integrates with Oracle’s Enterprise Data Quality tool, providing a comprehensive approach to data governance management.
• Uses algorithms that can stitch together metadata from disparate sources, showing the full path the data takes through systems.
• Allows users to include multimedia attachments (documents, videos, presentations, etc.) and URL links for emails, blogs and social media posts.

SAP Master Data Governance

SAP Master Data Governance is a part of the larger SAP Business Technology Platform, which includes various data management analytics and AI-associated technologies. The software is designed specifically to help organizations govern their master data — information that is essential to operations, covering key business entities such as customers, products and employees. It enables users to consolidate this data from various sources and manage it in one place, offering built-in data quality management and change management modules that work together to maintain consistency across systems while providing valuable insights. This tool comes in two versions: One that runs on top of SAP’s S/4HANA enterprise resource planning  system, and another that operates in the cloud.

Key Features

• Can be paired with SAP’s Master Data Integration tool to merge integration and governance capabilities. 
• Creates enterprise-wide insights into customers, products and suppliers using master data.
• Offers pre-built data models, business rules governance workflows and user interfaces to help streamline deployments.

Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview is a suite of solutions that handles all things related to data governance, data protection, risk management and compliance. The tool provides enhanced, comprehensive visibility to data assets across all environments and cloud platforms, helping organizations simplify tasks through automation, remain up-to-date with the latest data requirements and reduce data exposure to both internal and external security threats. Users can also identify risks using machine learning-powered analysis and enforce data loss prevention controls on specific users. 

Key Features

• Offers an e-discovery tool where users can collect, process, preserve and analyze their data in one place.
• Automatically protects sensitive data from unauthorized access across apps, services and on-premises files.
• Allows users to dynamically adjust the strength of their data security controls.

Snowflake Horizon

Snowflake Horizon offers a set of compliance, security, privacy, interoperability and access capabilities that can be integrated into the company’s larger AI Data Cloud platform. Designed specifically for data governors and stewards, as well as data teams, the software can be used to audit data and track its history, monitor data quality and understand relationships between data assets through object dependencies and lineage. It also safeguards data, apps and AI models with risk monitoring, built-in encryption and customizable authorization policies. 

Key Features

• Capabilities can be extended to Iceberg tables, as well as several other enterprise data catalog, governance and security platforms.
• Allows users to identify and track sensitive data with built-in object tagging and custom classification tools.
• Teams both inside and outside the organization can collaborate on sensitive data using Snowflake Data Clean Rooms.

Apache Atlas

Apache Atlas is an open source software that provides a wide range of metadata management and data governance capabilities, including cataloging, classification and collaboration tools. The platform represents metadata as “entities,” or instances of metadata types that store information about the metadata and their connections. This enables users to more efficiently trace the origins of their data along with all of its transformations and artifacts, removing some of the hassle involved with managing metadata through the more traditional labels and classifications. Though it is primarily designed for use in Hadoop clusters, Atlas can also exchange metadata with tools and processes outside of the Hadoop ecosystem, allowing integration with other systems for analytics applications. 

Key Features

• Integrates with the Apache Ranger data security framework, which allows users to mask their data and control who can access what information.
• Identifies new types of metadata that can be managed.
• Offers a function to search for data assets based on type, classification, attribute value or free-text.

Collibra Data Governance

Part of Collibra’s Data Intelligence platform, Collibra Data Governance helps data scientists find, clean and organize their data more efficiently. Among other things, the tool can be used to operationalize governance workflow and processes, create a shared language about data assets and make it easier to locate and understand relevant data. It also has a helpdesk function for reporting and resolving data issues, an assessments module for analyzing potential privacy risks and a feature that limits user access to specific data assets depending on their roles and responsibilities. 

Key Features

• Integrates with Collibra’s data catalog, data lineage and data quality tools as a part of the company’s larger Data Intelligence Cloud platform.
• Its policy manager feature centrally brings all data policies and standards to one place, while also monitoring their adoption and compliance.
• Has a data lineage tool that automatically maps how data flows from system to system, as well as how each asset gets produced, aggregated, sourced and used.

Alation Data Governance App

The Alation Data Governance platform makes it easier for teams to secure and control access to their data in IT systems, whether that be in hybrid and multi-cloud computing environments. It allows users to create and configure data governance workflows without any coding required, and even provides a dashboard where stakeholders can track how their data governance policies map to specific data assets. The tool also has a data stewardship workbench that helps organize and manage data automatically, using artificial intelligence to find potential data stewards based on their usage of the data.

Key Features

• Streamlines the approval of governance policies, procedures and documents.
• Automates data stewardship, classification, business glossary and quality documentation.
• Provides a centralized dashboard where leaders can keep track of their data governance programs.

Related ReadingData Visualization: What It Is and How to Use It

Infosphere Information Governance Catalog

The Infosphere Information Governance Catalog is another product from IBM that allows companies to create, manage and share a common business vocabulary around all their data assets, enact rules for how those data assets should be structured, stored and moved, and track how their data flows through the organizations. The product can also be combined with IBM’s Knowledge Catalog to leverage existing curated data sets.

Key Features

• Helps users move their data to the cloud without the need for an on-premises environment.
• Allows users to search through and visually explore data assets.
• Offers tools to help monitor and report metrics and adoption of data governance policies.

OneTrust Data Governance

OneTrust Data Governance is a part of a range of products made by security company OneTrust, offered alongside tools for data privacy, risk management and more. This data governance tool is powered by AI, machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA), allowing users to more easily define their data policies, collaborate across business functions and reduce the risk of data breaches and regulation violations. The platform also provides a centralized management console that warns users of any privacy risks with visual dashboards and reports.

Key Features

• Provides hundreds of pre-built connectors, as well as the ability to create custom connectors using OneTrust’s drag-and-drop workflow builder, Athena.
• With optical character recognition (OCR), users can access personal, sensitive and other data from various file types, including text, PDF, ZIP and images.
• Users can automate all of the manual processes involved in handling requests using adapting integration workflows.

Talend Data Fabric

Talend Data Fabric brings data integration, integrity and governance together into a single, unified platform. The tool includes a data catalog that can automatically crawl, organize and enrich metadata, a function that calculates the reliability of data sets at a glance and a team-based workflow for setting priorities and tracking projects. Users can share these services and their data across both internal departments and external groups using Talend’s API integration module.

Key Features

• Assesses the trustworthiness of specific data using Talend’s Trust Score tool.
• Offers a data inventory feature to break down data silos.
• Cloud independent and supports a variety of deployment architectures.

Erwin Data Intelligence

Created by cloud management company Quest Software, Erwin Data Intelligence is designed to help IT and data governance teams make their available data assets more visible to end users, as well as provide guidance and controls on how they should be used. The platform allows companies to track the data they collect and how they use it, and provides different metrics to make sure they adhere to their data policies and any relevant regulations. And role-based views can be tailored to offer more context about relevant data to different user groups.

Key Features

• Users can harvest and catalog metadata automatically, add business context and auto-generate data lineage to make their assets more understandable.
• Offers the ability to assign owners and subject-matter experts to help govern specific data assets.
• Provides a central dashboard where users can find, share and compare enterprise data.

Atlan 

Atlan helps data teams discover, understand, trust and collaborate on their data assets. With column-level lineage, users can trace their data pipelines and make sure the right data is used in the right place. They can also tag sensitive assets with classifications like PII (personally identifiable information), confidential or public, protect data with custom masking and link defined metrics to data so that teams know exactly which data to use.

Key Features

• Can auto-identify sensitive data based on whether it’s PII, or related to regulations like HIPAA and GDPR.
• Users can build a connected semantic layer by linking data to keywords in their business glossary.
• Integrates with popular data tools like Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks and Power BI.

SAS Information Governance

SAS Information Governance is a tool created by software company SAS Institute with the goal of helping businesses spend less time looking for and evaluating data, and more time working with it. Users can locate data, reports, models and more using a keyword search function, tag sensitive information for compliance and learn more about a data asset’s quality and usage to decide if it is the right choice for their analytics needs. They can also analyze the impact of their data with data lineage tools, getting a bird’s eye view of their assets and the relationships between them.

Key Features

• Can automatically crawl data sources, classify data and identify sensitive information.
• Sold as a separate product but can also be bundled into several other SAS Institute analytics tools as either a standard component or an optional add-on.
• Has built-in data quality, integration and lineage tools, along with a self-service user interface that provides views of required data preparation steps.

Data360 Govern

Created by data integrity company Precisely, Data360 Govern is an enterprise-level data governance, catalog and metadata management platform, where users can collect, organize, store and analyze information about their organization’s digital assets. Its automated data catalog feature automatically crawls, profiles, scores and manages metadata to build a single, searchable inventory of assets, while its flexible metamodel feature can be configured to mirror an organizations’ business model and ease the data governance process. It also facilitates collaborative discovery, reporting and auditing tasks, helping to foster compliance with HIPAA, GDPR and other legislation.

Key Features

• Offers AI tools to automatically tag data for classification or link to data.
• Provides real-time tracking of how specific data assets support various business processes and outcomes.
• Works with several other data quality solutions in Precisely’s Data Integrity Suite, including Data360 DQ+, Spectrum Quality and Trillium Quality.

Want More Data-Related Tools?These Are the Top Data Mining Companies to Know

Semarchy xDM

Semarchy xDM is the data management and governance arm of the Semarchy United Data Platform, which combines with the companion xDI tool for data integration. The xDM software enables organizations to build their own data models, with embedded rules and workflows for specific domains and business use cases. It also supports the development of dashboards to visualize data metrics, which includes a metadata repository and individual data stores for different data models that capture information on their lineage and usage. 

Key Features

• Can be deployed on premises, in the cloud or as a managed service.
• Enables role-based user permissions, as well as functions for regulatory compliance reporting.
• Users can design logical models defining their business entities and the rules that apply to those entities.

Rocket Data Intelligence

Rocket Data Intelligence is a metadata-driven tool designed to generate end-to-end views of data as it moves through IT systems, allowing organizations to better understand this information and apply guardrails on its use. Users start with a system inventory, where they identify critical data for their business and map the relationships between that data and specific applications. Then, they validate the integrity of their data and build a before-and-after view of the information for when they conduct initiatives like cloud migration or data integration. Finally, they use these insights to make improvements, such as reducing data bloat or removing low quality data.

Key Features

• Offers an enterprise metadata repository, with automated support for gathering metadata from hundreds of data sources.
• Automates data lineage documentation, providing visualized data flows mapped to specific business contexts. 
• Works in cloud, distributed and mainframe infrastructures.

Axon Data Governance

Axon Data Governance is a tool created by software development company Informatica that uses AI-driven automation to help stewards streamline their data discovery, quality evaluation and communication processes. It also enables governance teams to create their own data dictionaries, where they can define connections between data elements, identify gaps in their data sets and link policies and regulations to the data they affect.

Key Features

• Integrates with other Informatica products, including its data catalog, data quality and data preparation tools.
• Its Cloud Data Marketplace is an intelligent, cloud-native solution for data sharing.
• Compliant with regulations like GDPR, CCPA, BCBS 239 and HIPAA.

Ataccama ONE

Ataccama ONE is an AI-powered software that calculates data quality and classifies it in a data catalog so that data teams can better understand their company’s data. All data is automatically profiled, allowing users to dive deeper into any data set and identify duplicates, anomalies, patterns and other characteristics. They can also build out business glossaries, monitor their data quality and make improvements. The tool was built to be used in highly regulated industries, with features that include a full audit history and role-based security.

Key Features

• Comes in on-premises, cloud and hybrid formats.
• Enables low-code and no-code customization for data quality rules.
• Automates anomaly detection, business rule assignment and other tasks.

Syniti Knowledge Platform

Syniti Knowledge Platform is a cloud-based platform that offers a full set of data management capabilities, including data governance, data migration and data replication tools. Underpinned by an embedded data catalog, the software can ingest data from hundreds of sources and automatically generate metadata, using machine learning to help build semantic models that associate the metadata with an organization’s business processes, rules and terms. It also facilitates data migrations, automatically capturing every mapping, rule, policy and team member to align with and improve an organization’s governance strategy.

Key Features

• Its data matching tool leverages natural language processing and algorithms to accurately match, deduplicate and harmonize data.
• Offers collaboration tools, including automated workflows that can be used to crowdsource data insights and best practices.
• Offers a standard set of data intelligence dashboards, as well as support for creating custom ones.

Frequently Asked Questions