An overview of IBM data governance solutions

IBM data governance tools help you manage your organization’s data. With these tools, you can take control of your company’s information. These solutions ensure that enterprise data is usable and compliant with business, regulatory, legal and risk requirements across all applications and infrastructure.

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IBM data governance helps organizations make decisions by providing insights from data collected across various channels and mediums. It also gives companies rules on how to use that data to be valuable to their organization. By implementing strategies that improve data governance, businesses can provide their team with the best resources to make data-driven decisions and deliver results to business stakeholders.

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Top IBM data governance tools

IBM’s data governance intelligent solutions link disparate systems, govern the life-cycle of data from creation to destruction, manage data from requirements through retirement, enforce security policies and identify risks by building a consistent data management strategy without boundaries between people, processes and technologies.

IBM Cloud Pak

IBM Cloud Pak for Data is a cloud-native AI platform built with data fabric architecture to predict outcomes faster and allow users to collect, organize and analyze their data, regardless of where it is stored.

The system connects disparate systems, automates important business processes and gives a platform that allows a holistic, unified view of priorities. In addition, by enabling an AI workflow integrated with data governance and privacy, IBM’s Cloud Pak for data delivers an experience based on metadata and active policy management, thereby eliminating the challenge of data access.

Features of IBM Cloud Pak

• Multicloud data access: IBM Cloud Pak for Data offers unified access across multi-clouds.
• Intelligent knowledge catalog: Delivers business-ready data to users by providing intelligent search capabilities, fast performance for large datasets and role-based user authorization.
• Pervasive data privacy and security: Provides data protection and ensures user compliance with regulations, including GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act). Provides granular control over who can see or interact with the data, ensuring complete confidentiality at all times.

IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog

IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog is a cloud-based data catalog that helps organizations access, curate, categorize and share data, knowledge assets and connections from any location. WKC can manage structured, semi-structured and unstructured information to provide insight into the contents of your organization’s data.

You can create business decisions by leveraging data insights with WKC. It offers intelligent cataloging, automated metadata collection and policy management to guarantee that model information is captured and stored automatically for transparency and repeatability.

Features of IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog

• Advanced discovery: Search using intelligent recommendations from IBM Watson and peers.
• Operationalized quality: Monitor lineage and quality ratings for all data types, including AI models, notebooks and structured and unstructured data.
• Flexible deployment: Customers can deploy on-premise, on the cloud or use the as-a-service model on IBM Cloud Pak for Data.
• Automated governance: Ensure compliance with relevant industry regulations like GDPR.
• Self-service insights: Deliver instant access to insights about your data at scale and generate visualizations and interactive dashboards on the fly.

OpenPages Data Privacy Management

IBM OpenPages Data Privacy Management is a solution for privacy reporting and risk management to ensure compliance. This solution helps organizations protect sensitive information by providing tools to organize, manage, analyze and report on personal data in a centralized repository.

It provides visibility into the risks associated with processing, storing or transmitting private information. With its visibility and control, organizations can implement processes and controls that simplify compliance with regulatory requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA and the California Consumer Privacy Act.

Features of OpenPages Data Privacy Management

• Privacy officer dashboard: The privacy officer dashboard provides insights about an organization’s data privacy maturity and risks by identifying assets by jurisdiction and status of privacy assessments.
• Privacy assessment: Conducts an examination of an organization’s process flow and data handling policies through a series of interactive self-assessments.
• Issue management: Address issues identified during privacy assessment with remediation steps before they impact operations.

IBM InfoSphere Optim

IBM InfoSphere Optim is a solution that helps you identify, consolidate and manage your most critical business information assets. It can help you maximize the value of your information assets by aligning them with your business goals and objectives. The solution includes access to all aspects of data life-cycle management, from requirements through retirement.

Features of IBM InfoSphere Optim

• Application retirement and consolidation
• Test data management capabilities
• Maximize the business value of big data environments
• Single scalable archiving solution for the enterprise

IBM Knowledge Accelerators

IBM Knowledge Accelerators operates on IBM Cloud Pak for Data to provide services that help organizations align concepts from industry regulations and guidelines with their company data to enhance regulatory compliance.

In addition, this solution ensures extensibility with a glossary and faster time to value by optimizing workflow and scale enterprise data quality, data discovery, metadata enrichment and governance.

Features of IBM Knowledge Accelerators

• Accelerates auto-classification and data governance
• Unifies multiple regulations and industry standards
• Availability of importable business scopes
• Business core vocabulary
• Business performance indicators

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog is a web-based interactive solution that allows users to create, manage and distribute an enterprise vocabulary and classification system in a central catalog. It helps users understand the business worth of their assets by allowing them to search, explore and query them. Users may also create asset collections and conduct lineage reports to analyze data flow between assets.

Features of IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog

• Data flow visualization across the information landscape
• Monitor metrics and governance adoption
• Visualize and search data
• Create data ownership and documentation

IBM data governance framework explained

As an organization grows, it’s important to have a plan to protect and manage data. The IBM data governance framework is a set of best practices that helps businesses create an overarching strategy for managing the life cycle of their data.

IBM’s data governance practice framework includes four types of control:

• Ensure: Controls for guiding work.
• Assure: Controls for doing work.
• Insure: Controls for operating.
• Reassure: Controls for continuity.

These controls allow companies to identify, protect, manage, monitor and report on their data. They do this by working with their business leaders, functional heads and IT teams across the organization to create unified standards for how companies should use information from creation through disposal.

For example, the Identify phase will help establish roles and responsibilities for stakeholders within the organization; Protect will provide guidelines for how to store all types of data securely; Manage can help ensure high-quality information; Monitor can give insight into what’s happening with information assets. Finally, Report covers tools that generate comprehensive reports on all aspects of data management.

The framework helps build an environment where accountability and responsibility are clear across the enterprise.

Benefits of IBM data governance tools

With IBM data governance tools, you can take control of your company’s information and make it more reliable, safe and secure. You’ll be able to:

• Simplify managing complex enterprise data without compromising performance or increasing costs.
• Reduce risk and compliance requirements with real-time monitoring and continuous validation.
• Ensure application compliance by using automated processes to ensure that applications adhere to established data storage, use and disclosure policies.
• Help eliminate security risks by enabling deep visibility into how sensitive information moves through the enterprise.

IBM data governance tool reviews

IBM has been working hard to develop various data governance solutions to help customers take control of their information assets. As a top data governance solution provider, IBM has been reviewed by thousands of actual users across various software review sites.

According to Gartner, 82% of current users are willing to recommend IBM data governance tools. It received an excellent score for evaluation and contracting (4.3 out of 5), integration and deployment (4.3 out of 5), service and support (4.4 out of 5) and product capabilities (4.5 out of 5).

Most users find IBM’s data governance solutions useful because it helps them implement strategies that improve enterprise data governance, provide their team with the resources they need to make data-driven decisions and deliver results to their business stakeholders. However, as a feature-rich tool, it has a steep learning curve and requires a significant time investment to maximize the product offerings.