Alation Introduces Agile Information Stewardship with the Release of TrustCheck

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — July. 12, 2018 Alation Inc., the data intelligence company, today announced the general availability of TrustCheck, a new set of features that transforms data governance practices. Alation TrustCheck introduces real-time data governance guardrails directly into the workflow of self-service analytics users. TrustCheck users are automatically alerted to both constraints and best practices, leading to more timely, accurate and compliant analysis.

Knowledge workers can’t (and won’t) continually break their workflow to look up terms, validate the correct application of policies, discover impacts, and ensure data quality. With the release of TrustCheck, we’re bringing policy, quality and usage context directly to the end user. TrustCheck lets every self-service analytics user instantly know whether the data or query logic selected is trustworthy and appropriate, irrespective of whether that data lives in Salesforce, Tableau, or is being accessed directly from a database.

– Satyen Sangani, CEO, Alation

According to the May 2018 Gartner Market Guide for Information Stewardship Applications, “The recent complexity that is emerging — associated with such things as increased interest in data lakes, and now IoT analytics — is extending the need for operational policy enforcement in analytical use cases.”

In a world of tightly constrained users of analytics, top-down data governance was often successful, but the growth in data and users has outpaced this model’s ability to be effective.

Before self-service analytics, data governance teams focused on documentation and control, relying on a few select experts who spent time arduously creating rules and policies for data use. Resolving compliance issues often meant policing user behavior after a breach or critical mistake already occurred. Broad-based adoption of self-service analytics and an exponential growth in data creation has changed this environment dramatically. TrustCheck meets the needs of this new world with the power of a data catalog. With TrustCheck, data governance and information stewardship professionals can focus on influencing user behavior rather than documenting rules and policies.

TrustCheck is an embedded set of features in Alation’s machine learning-powered data catalog. Information stewards leverage the Alation Data Catalog to indicate whether a data asset can be trusted or requires additional context, and deprecate data assets that contain inaccuracies or could lead to non-compliance. This feedback to users is available immediately through Alation’s query writing tool, Alation Compose, and through API-driven integrations with Salesforce Einstein Analytics and Tableau Server.

TrustCheck automatically surfaces visual cues in Alation’s Compose interface, where users search and write SQL queries, and directly on dashboards within Salesforce Einstein and Tableau Server. Alation’s delivery of this feature through a well-documented API also provides the opportunity for additional analytic tools to easily integrate TrustCheck in the future.

See a demo of TrustCheck to learn how Alation supports agile information stewardship.

“The Alation Data Catalog continues to evolve, bringing new tools and techniques to information and metadata management. The company has positioned itself to support increasingly agile approaches to data stewardship and data governance, including risk and compliance,” said Matt Aslett, research director for 451 Research.

“Alation’s new TrustCheck feature demonstrates that surfacing quality data and best practices for decision-making is rapidly becoming a necessity for any organization that relies on shared data assets for their reporting and analytics demands,” said David Loshin, president of Knowledge Integrity Inc.

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.