How Automated Data Lineage Improves Governance & Compliance

Data lineage is essential for organizations that make data-driven decisions, as it ensures the quality, accuracy, and integrity of data. By tracing data from its source to its destination, organizations can gain insight into how data is flowing, where it comes from, and where it should go.

However, managing data lineage manually isn’t feasible for most organizations, especially if you’re a large organization or growing organization. Automating data lineage is critical for a comprehensive data management strategy, and it can help companies maximize the value of their data. In this blog, we’ll be looking into how automated data lineage improves areas like governance and compliance in an organization and the other benefits it can provide.

A Brief Overview

More organizations rely on data to make business decisions than ever. Organizations need to manage this data carefully to ensure accuracy, security, and reliability. Part of this management process is tracking data lineage. Data lineage looks at the movement of data from its source to its destination. It helps companies learn how their data is created, processed, and transformed throughout its life cycle. Understanding this information is key to effectively governing, managing, and analyzing data.

Manually tracing data lineage can be time-consuming, resource-intensive, and prone to error. Most companies simply don’t have the bandwidth to continually trace and manage data lineage manually. Automated data lineage is a solution to remove a lot of this work and make the process more efficient and effective.

What Is Automated Data Lineage?

Put simply, automated data lineage uses tools and technology to automatically capture information about the life cycle of data. Automated data lineage tools, like Secoda, can track the flow of data through various systems, and identify changes and modifications, document sources, document destinations, and much more.

With automated data lineage, companies can get a comprehensive map of their data assets and gain greater transparency and control over the data life cycle. This better understanding of data improves quality, simplifies regulatory compliance, increases productivity, and saves money. 

In short, automated data lineage is a more cost-effective and efficient way for organizations to trace data lineage. With that being said, let’s take a closer look at some of these benefits.

Improved Data Quality

One of the main benefits of automating data lineage is improved data quality. When organizations can track the journey of data from its source to its final destination, it’s easier to spot and address any errors that may occur along the way.

It also makes it easier to identify data quality issues early in the flow of data. Automated data lineage tools can help profile your data and find downstream issues due to poor data quality, allowing you to continually improve the accuracy of your data and its sources.

Organizations need accurate and reliable data to be confident in their data-driven decisions. When you can manage quality through automated data lineage, you can ensure you’re these decisions are backed by quality data, which leads to better business outcomes overall.

Better Regulatory Compliance

In big data collection, it’s essential for businesses to stay up to date with compliance regulations and industry standards. When you track your data manually, it can be difficult to demonstrate compliance and ensure you’re adhering to these regulatory requirements. Many automated data lineage tools can automate these compliance measures, so you can avoid regulatory penalties and fines. 

When you have a clear picture of the flow of your data, you can easily demonstrate where data is coming from, where it goes, and who has access. When sensitive data is identified in the automated data lineage process, you can ensure it is stored and protected according to the appropriate regulatory measures. These tools can also help you quickly identify when there may be a compliance issue, so you can fix the problem before it becomes a bigger issue.

In short, regulatory compliance is not always easy to demonstrate, but automated data lineage provides the transparency and convenient traceability you need to protect your data and protect your company from penalties and fines.

Increased Productivity

Unsurprisingly, automating data lineage tasks also leads to increased productivity. When employees don’t have to spend time manually tracing lineage, there is more time for employees to focus on other kinds of work. Also, when a data issue needs to be investigated, a data team member can simply pull up the data lineage tool instead of having to track down the issue manually.

Automated data lineage also helps to streamline the decision-making process. When the quality and source of the data aren’t being questioned, team members can be more confident in their data-driven decisions. This increased speed and efficiency can lead to a competitive advantage for companies that automate their data lineage processes.

Improved Collaboration

Collaboration is essential for organizations that use a lot of data. However, it can sometimes be difficult for teams to collaborate due to data silos and different data practices. Automated data lineage helps here too.

Collaboration can be seamless with automated data lineage tools. Teams can all access the same data insights, leading to better communication. It also makes sure everyone is working from the same information. For example, let’s say your marketing team wants to see what channels your customers use most to buy a product. To identify these channels, they may need data from the eCommerce and sales teams. With automated data lineage, they can see the data these teams are collecting and make better data-driven decisions based on other teams’ data to focus their marketing efforts.

Overall, automated data lineage leads to better data-driven decisions and more consistent outcomes across teams. It enables teams to work together more efficiently and effectively than ever before.

Faster Root Cause Analysis

As you may have picked up in some of the other talking points, one of the biggest key benefits of automated data lineage is faster root cause analysis. When looking at traditional or manual data management systems, tracing data lineage to identify the cause of errors or inconsistencies can be tedious and time-consuming at best. Automated data lineage removes the need to manually trace the root cause of these errors and inconsistencies, with many tools alerting you to these issues as they occur. This allows data teams to address these issues as soon as possible.

As discussed, automated data lineage allows users to track data from its source to its end destination. With automated data lineage, you can pull up information on the origin of the problem data and follow it throughout its lifecycle to see where the issues are arising. This saves organizations valuable time and resources, removing manual work and hassle.

In addition to alerting data teams of these issues, automated data lineage also helps teams identify patterns in data over time. This can help with preventative maintenance, helping to catch data issues before they even arise. In short, automated data lineage allows data teams to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to identifying and resolving data issues.

Enhanced Data Governance

Data governance is always a challenge for organizations that collect and analyze large amounts of data. However, it’s exceedingly important for these organizations to have proper data governance practices in place and adhere to industry data standards and regulations. Failing to do so can lead to penalties and fines that are detrimental to business.

One important facet of data governance is having a clear understanding of the ownership of data, the usage of data in the organization, and the source of data. Additionally, companies need to make sure they ensure their data is being used ethically and that it is secure.

With automated data lineage, it is much easier for organizations to enhance their data governance practices. Organizations can have a clear picture of where data comes from, how it is used, and who is ultimately responsible for its usage and security. Automated data lineage can make it also simpler for organizations to prove compliance and trace where data issues might have compromised any data governance policies they have in place.

For example, an organization can use automated data lineage tools to find where sensitive data is used and where it is accessed, along with who is accessing it. This way, they can designate the proper user access controls and prevent sensitive data from being misused.

Overall, implementing automated data lineage can have a significant impact on an organization's data governance practices, providing greater transparency, accountability, and control over their data. By enhancing data governance practices, organizations can mitigate risks and make more informed decisions based on reliable data insights.

Try Secoda for Free

Secoda is your solution for automated data lineage. Implementing Secoda gives you comprehensive visibility into your entire data stack, enabling you to effortlessly trace data flow from end to end. Secoda's automation capabilities can handle a wide range of tasks, including metadata documentation, data mapping automation, impact notifications, visualizations for data quality testing, and much more. Secoda also makes integration simple, seamlessly integrating with most databases and systems through REST or API connections.

In addition to its data lineage automation, Secoda serves as an all-in-one platform with tools for data cataloging, data discovery, data documentation, data sharing, data ticketing, data analysis, data dictionary, and data access management. Find out how Secoda can automate your data lineage processes. Schedule your demo or try Secoda for free today.