More professionals than ever think Data Lineage is critical. Why?

More data than ever is flowing into the cloud leading to ever–more-complex environments. The development and roll-out of technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and 5G will only continue to compound this data overflow. IDC Research expects data growth to rise by 61% by 2025. Most organisations are in their infancy regarding data management initiatives and won’t be able to keep up. New strategies to manage complexity, identify and create value from these massive systems are necessary to succeed.

Data management is the best form of business insurance

To deal with this reality, more organisations are turning to Metadata Management. This article will introduce one aspect of metadata management — data lineage — and why it is so critical.

What is Data Lineage?

Data Lineage reveals the entire lifecycle of data within an organisation, including how it transforms and moves from place to place. Alex Data Lineage achieves this by unifying disjointed systems across an enterprise seamlessly with powerful connectors. A beautiful visualisation is then produced, which enables at-a-glance analysis of data flow. Facts about data movements, accessibility, usage and more are captured from end-to-end. This radically increases asset visibility across all types of data sources and supports data discovery as users can easily view the links between chosen environments and the relationships between them. Every piece of data is tracked through every transformation, so you can always analyse upstream and downstream technological and business impacts. Put simply, lineage allows you to spend less of your valuable time investigating data or systems and dedicate it towards taking the actions that will give you a strategic advantage.

Make Risk Vanish

Perhaps the most critical use of data lineage though is its capability of massively reducing risk. Inevitable to the growth of cloud data and remote work is the concurrent growth of sensitive data stored and shared by companies. Alex’s automated Data Lineage is one of the fastest and most reliable solutions to manage compliance with correlatively increasing regulations. One of the world’s largest companies is using Alex Data Lineage to report their entire dataflow — including all processing — to the regulator. Previously faced with limited understanding of where assets entered their systems or their journey afterwards, Alex unlocked this knowledge. Our automation alleviated the strain of manual data capture and analysis and replaced ad-hoc with simple and repeatable processes. Hundreds of different applications holding over tens of millions of data assets have been scanned to generate report-ready Data Lineage visualisations. Built-in workflows enable collaboration and ensure processes are followed ‘by the book’.

In a time of crisis, businesses need to make decisions even faster than usual. To manage overflowing complexity and turn data assets into insights, companies should leverage data lineage. With a metadata management solution like Alex that connects your systems in one place and facilitates organisational understanding of data, you’ll be best equipped to navigate the future of work.

If you want to learn more about how Alex can help your organisation achieve data success, get in touch with our friendly team today!