Alation launches business lineage

Alation has introduced business lineage to provide business users with broad and rich visibility into data’s journey as it flows and transforms through systems. This visibility increases trust in the data and accelerates time to insights. Business lineage is an extension of Alation’s end-to-end data lineage, providing an abstraction layer to filter views of data flows and visualize relationships across technical, system, and business metadata. This unified approach offers a complete view so that all users can confidently and effectively harness information to unlock the full potential of an organization’s information assets for improved decision-making.

AI and cloud technologies have provided opportunities for organizations to enhance their products, services, and business models using their enterprise data. However, the increasing number of data sources has intensified data fragmentation and data silos, making it difficult to use data effectively. This complicates tracing data origins and understanding how it is transformed across its lifecycle. IDC reports that 41% of organizations believe that data is changing faster than they can keep up with, and 33% believe data is disaggregated or siloed across the organization, preventing the ability to extract more value from data. 64% of these organizations also believe that the volume of metadata is growing faster or significantly faster than raw data is created or collected. Organizations need lineage to provide users with this end-to-end view and certify data trust.

The Alation Data Intelligence Platform provides deep and broad connectivity to over 100 data sources providing a unified view of data, abstracted and exposed via rich metadata. This gives organizations a comprehensive map of their data environment and flexible ways to visualize the end-to-end data flows at either the business or technical level through a single-pane-of-glass. It enables users to apply various filters to uncover more details, such as technical code references or data health indicators, to accelerate time to insights. This approach helps less technical users, such as business analysts, understand data issues and track metrics across systems to uncover data quality issues without the need to write queries. With lineage, users can instantaneously certify the trust of a dashboard and quickly conduct quality checks to ensure that data is endorsed and trusted.

“Alation's actionable, end-to-end business lineage serves both business and technical personas in the organization, helping them to understand the flow of their data from the initial point of capture through to consumption,” said John Gilbert, Data Governance Manager at Cbus. “This provides an audit trail and enables change impact analysis, reducing risks and ensuring that corporate data is managed as a critical asset and implemented in an effective and sustainable manner. This foundational strengthening of data governance underpins the four pillars of data culture maturity, providing a robust framework for our organization to become more competitive, compliant, and innovative in the face of change.”

“Collecting data is just the start; empowering everyone to truly understand and trust it unlocks its real value,” said Diby Malakar, Vice President of Product Management at Alation. “Alation’s business lineage sheds light on the data's journey, offering crucial context for impactful decisions. Integrating trusted data into strategic planning empowers companies to make swift, informed choices, reinforcing data governance as a fundamental pillar of business operations. This strengthens data culture, dismantles silos, and ensures data is fully leveraged in a governed way, blending data, people, and policies to foster insightful, collaborative decision-making and unlock data’s full potential.”

Alation’s lineage empowers technical and business teams to foster data trust and accelerate time to insights with:

• Increased transparency. By providing data maps, all users can benefit from a better understanding of the data in a visual context that is meaningful to them. Users can also trace critical KPIs and metrics back to their sources and highlight essential data elements with contextual metadata overlays, such as data health, sensitivity, policies, or a chosen custom field, while filters allow users to see exactly what they need and drill down into areas of interest.

• Stronger data governance. With visibility into the movement and usage of sensitive data across the organization, audit times are significantly reduced. Additionally, governance teams can use classification metadata overlays in a business lineage view to see the movement and use of this data. Finally, Alation’s lineage provides users with the ability to monitor changes and trace them through an audit trail, enhancing governance with a retrospective view, and understanding impact analysis. This means users are aware of the consequences of their changes and identify who will be affected, fostering greater interconnectivity among teams.

• Reduced costs. Business lineage reduces development and maintenance costs by streamlining change processes. Impact analysis and Trust Flags expedite error identification and correction, preventing expensive outages and reducing the time needed for root cause analysis. In addition, Alation's query log ingestion process provides essential operational metadata to help data operations teams derive insights that support cost savings through data pipeline performance optimization and technical debt reduction.