The entire community of data managers (DBAs, Data Analysts, Data Architects, and Data Warehouse staff) have been traditionally tasked with the responsibilities of data availability and integrity and must support the ability of the organization to derive useful and actionable intelligence from enterprise data.

In recent years data managers have had to expand the scope of their responsibilities beyond traditional areas of availability, accuracy, integrity, and accessibility of data assets. New responsibilities include restricting or controlling accessibility to specific data, auditing access, and tracking specific data use managing the distribution, sharing, storage, and conditions associated with data access. Data managers have also been recently burdened with embedding business policy in the design, implementation, operation, and development of data structures, data stores, and applications. These conflicting responsibilities have often been implemented at the expense of the traditional goals of data availability, accuracy, integrity, and accessibility of data assets.

The specific challenges of data managers in supporting data governance programs are:

• Maintaining complete and accurate data inventories, classification schemes, and meta-data dictionaries that can be leveraged by compliance staff for better tracking and management of governance programs.
• Managing security rules, SQL conditions, database security configurations, data access audit logs, and rules regarding data views, virtual private databases, and field and column encryption/masking.
  For instance Email Marketing Application and/or Stored Procedure may Access Customer Email Address if Customer Consent for Email Marketing Obtained.
• Ensuring the architectures, design, development, and deployment of data technologies are resilient with the changing pace of business policies.

The Align suite can assist data managers in enforcing, auditing, and supporting data governance programs by providing:

• A data-policy framework built on a simple meta-data dictionary leveraging existing classification work to include user credential information (LDAP, Active Directory, Database ACL) and data schema classification work, allowing for detailed reporting, tracking, and inventories.
• An easily deployed and managed data-policy provisioning solution that allows data users and compliance officers to interact, collaborate, and communicate while reducing the burden and demands on data managers.
• High-risk policy-violation incidents, trend-based, historical and performance metrics can help data managers optimize data organization, and then improve the security and governance regarding the use of data.

If you would like to speak with a Synomos representative regarding Align please contact us.