Governing data with Informatica

Informatica entered the data governance market in 2017 following its acquisition of Diaku, a data governance company. In the six years that followed Informatica’s offering has evolved into Informatica Cloud Data Governance & Catalog, part of its Intelligent Data Management Cloud software suite. The product now has over five hundred cloud users spread across the world, so is one of the leading data governance offerings. Customers include 3M, Hershey, Blue Cross and Yamaha. It competes with specialist vendors such as Collibra and Alation, as well as other data governance vendors and products from companies that have data governance as part of a broader data management suite.

Informatica Cloud Data Governance & Catalog has the complete range of functionality that you would expect from such a product. It has a broad range of catalog scanners to access multi-cloud and hybrid data sources and enterprise applications such as SAP, pre-built data classifications, automated data lineage, visual displays such as knowledge graphs to navigate a corporate data landscape, and a self-service data marketplace. The product is integrated with the well-established data quality tools from Informatica, as well as the CLAIRE machine learning-driven metadata layer and AI engine of the Informatica software. In particular, this allows business users to use natural language to find trusted datasets and understand their business context, generate rules and business glossaries. The software learns from its interactions with business users to adapt and generate more relevant responses.

Informatica continues to grow the capabilities of the product, acquiring data privacy and security specialist Privitar in July 2023. This acquisition allows Informatica to go further than merely governing access rules and policies to actually enforcing them too with automated policy-based data access management.  This continued investment in data governance shows the vendor’s commitment to the space, which makes sense since data governance is a growing field that often lies at the heart of an organisation’s data management efforts, usually implying good business engagement and data ownership. Informatica has for many years been strong in data movement, data quality and master data management. Data governance is highly complementary to these areas, so a strong product in this area allows Informatica to expand its footprint with organisations.