SAS Data Governance

The core SAS Viya platform can be deployed either on a public cloud, private cloud, on-premises or in hybrid configurations. It has a very wide range of core functionality, from data access and integration through to data deployment, analytics and general data management. From a data governance perspective, it has a data catalog, business glossary, a comprehensive data quality capability and advanced search capabilities, including a natural language interface. The product includes support for data lineage, automatic data classification and the ability to detect and handle data that is marked as sensitive, such as personally identifiable data like social security numbers.

Fig 1 – Govern data with SAS Viya

Customer Quotes

“Our move to SAS Viya represents a real leap forward in data visualisation.” 
Florence Vuillet, Data Director, UTWIN

“Since implementing SAS, we’re a lot more data-driven as an organization. The data is pretty much telling us what to do instead of individual beliefs and personal opinions.” 
Sandy Kirchhoff, Senior Manager of Marketing Planning and Customer Marketing for Viking Europe

The SAS catalog allows the data assets of an enterprise to be classified and searched, including a full business glossary where descriptions can be added to give context to company-specific business data. There is a comprehensive facility to navigate the catalog, not just through lists and basis search capability but also via a natural language interface. In the future, this may be supplemented by a capability based on a large language model.

Fig 2 – Quality and Data Governance Themes

SAS has extensive data profiling capabilities, and it uses this when ingesting data to detect various aspects of the data. In particular, it supports standards such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and HIPAA
(The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability) to detect information that is likely to be personally identifiable or sensitive, such as social security numbers or addresses. The product maintains tracking of data from its source, including transformations applied, which is helpful for traceability for compliance and audit purposes. Data access can be restricted at a granular level, so for example, data masking can be applied to sensitive data.

SAS partners with other companies that provide specialist services in this area. For example, it uses Loqate for customer name and address validation, phone number validation and email validation.

If you are a SAS customer (and, one way or another, most larger corporations are to a greater or lesser degree) then the data governance capabilities of the product are worthy of your attention. It has a quite complete set of functionality, and it plays well with other specialist tools where there are gaps in functionality, such as its partnership with Loqate for name and address validation.

If you don’t have SAS at all and are starting from scratch in data governance, then you might consider a specialist data catalog vendor, since SAS has a great deal of functionality beyond data governance, so it may be quite a big decision to implement such a broad platform just for one relatively constrained area of functionality. Nonetheless, it would still be worth evaluating, particularly if you can see potential benefits of SAS in other areas such as complex analytics, where it made its reputation.

The bottom line

SAS is a major data management vendor, with over 83,000 customers and a comprehensive set of functionality in data analytics and data science. A significant subset (estimated at around 5,000) of these customers use the SAS data governance capabilities including the catalog, so SAS is a significant data governance vendor in its own right. The functionality that SAS offers is quite comprehensive, from data catalog through to business glossary, from data integration and access through to data quality as well as workflow. If you are a SAS customer then it is well worth considering this as an option for your data governance needs, as it may well be a viable alternative to a specialist catalog vendor.