Data Governance

Tackling Complex Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry

Actian Corporation

June 19, 2025

Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry

The banking industry is one of the most heavily regulated sectors, and as financial services evolve, the challenges of managing, governing, and ensuring compliance with vast amounts of information have grown exponentially. With the introduction of stringent regulations, increasing data privacy concerns, and growing customer expectations for seamless service, banks face complex data governance challenges. These challenges include managing large volumes of sensitive data, maintaining data integrity, ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks, and improving data transparency for both internal and external stakeholders.

In this article, we explore the core data governance challenges faced by the banking industry and how the Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps banking organizations navigate these challenges. From ensuring compliance with financial regulations to improving data transparency and integrity, the platform offers a comprehensive solution to help banks unlock the true value of their data while maintaining robust governance practices.

The Data Governance Landscape in Banking

The financial services sector generates and manages massive volumes of data daily, spanning customer accounts, transactions, risk assessments, compliance checks, and much more. Managing this data effectively and securely is vital to ensure the smooth operation of financial institutions and to meet regulatory and compliance requirements. Financial institutions must implement robust data governance to ensure data quality, security, integrity, and transparency.

At the same time, banks must balance regulatory requirements, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction. This requires implementing systems that can handle increasing amounts of data while maintaining compliance with local and international regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, Basel III, and MiFID II.

Key Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry

Below are some common hurdles and challenges facing organizations in the banking industry.

Data Privacy and Protection

With the rise of data breaches and increasing concerns about consumer privacy, banks are under immense pressure to safeguard sensitive customer information. Regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have made data protection a top priority for financial institutions. Ensuring that data is appropriately stored, accessed, and shared is vital for compliance, but it’s also vital for maintaining public trust.

Regulatory Compliance

Banks operate in a highly regulated environment, where compliance with numerous financial regulations is mandatory. Financial regulations are continuously evolving, and keeping up with changes in the law requires financial institutions to adopt efficient data governance practices that allow them to demonstrate compliance.

For example, Basel III outlines requirements for the management of banking risk and capital adequacy, while MiFID II requires detailed reporting on market activities and transaction records. In this landscape, managing compliance through data governance is no small feat.

Data Silos and Fragmentation

Many financial institutions operate in a fragmented environment, where data is stored across multiple systems, databases, and departments. This lack of integration can make it difficult to access and track data effectively. For banks, this fragmentation into data silos complicates the management of data governance processes, especially when it comes to ensuring data accuracy, consistency, and completeness.

Data Transparency and Integrity

Ensuring the integrity and transparency of data is a major concern in the banking industry. Banks need to be able to trace the origins of data, understand how it’s been used and modified, and provide visibility into its lifecycle. This is particularly important for audits, regulatory reporting, and risk management processes.

Operational Efficiency

As financial institutions grow and manage increasing amounts of data, operational efficiency in data management becomes increasingly challenging. Ensuring compliance with regulations, conducting audits, and reporting on data use can quickly become burdensome without the right data governance tools in place. Manual processes are prone to errors and inefficiencies, which can have costly consequences for banks.

How the Actian Data Intelligence Platform Tackles Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform is designed to help organizations tackle the most complex data governance challenges. With its comprehensive set of tools, The platform supports banks by helping ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, improving data transparency and integrity, and creating a more efficient and organized data governance strategy.

Here’s how the Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps the banking industry overcome its data governance challenges.

1. Ensuring Compliance With Financial Regulations

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps banks achieve regulatory compliance by automating compliance monitoring, data classification, and metadata management.

Regulatory Compliance Automation: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform enables banks to automate compliance tracking and continuously monitor data access and usage. This helps banks ensure that they are consistently meeting the requirements of regulatory frameworks like GDPR, Basel III, MiFID II, and others. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s compliance monitoring tools also automatically flag any data access or changes to data that may violate compliance rules, giving banks the ability to react quickly and mitigate risks.
Data Classification for Compliance: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform allows banks to classify and categorize data based on its sensitivity and compliance requirements. By tagging data with relevant metadata, such as classification labels (e.g., personal data, sensitive data, financial data), The Actian Data Intelligence Platform ensures that sensitive information is handled in accordance with regulatory standards.
Audit Trails and Reporting: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s audit trail functionality creates comprehensive logs of data access, usage, and modifications. These logs are crucial for financial institutions when preparing for audits or responding to regulatory inquiries. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform automates the creation of compliance reports, making it easier for banks to demonstrate their adherence to regulatory standards.

2. Improving Data Transparency and Integrity

Data transparency and integrity are critical for financial institutions, particularly when it comes to meeting regulatory requirements for reporting and audit purposes. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers tools that ensure data is accurately tracked and fully transparent, which helps improve data governance practices within the bank.

Data Lineage: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s data lineage functionality provides a visual map of how data flows through the bank’s systems, helping stakeholders understand where the data originated, how it has been transformed, and where it is currently stored. This is essential for transparency, especially when it comes to auditing and compliance reporting.
Metadata Management: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s metadata management capabilities enable banks to organize, track, and maintain metadata for all data assets across the organization. This not only improves transparency but also ensures that data is properly classified and described, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies. With clear metadata, banks can ensure that data is correctly used and maintained across systems.
Data Quality Monitoring: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform continuously monitors data quality, ensuring that data remains accurate, complete, and consistent across systems. Data integrity is crucial for banks, as decisions made based on poor-quality data can lead to financial losses, reputational damage, and non-compliance.

3. Eliminating Data Silos and Improving Data Integration

Fragmented data and siloed systems are a common challenge for financial institutions. Data often resides in disparate databases or platforms across different departments, making it difficult to access and track efficiently. The platform provides the tools to integrate data governance processes and eliminate silos.

Centralized Data Catalog: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers a centralized data catalog that enables banks to consolidate and organize all their data assets using a single platform. This centralized repository improves the discoverability of data across departments and systems, helping banks streamline data access and reduce inefficiencies.
Cross-Department Collaboration: With the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, departments across the organization can collaborate on data governance. By centralizing governance policies, data access, and metadata, The Actian Data Intelligence Platform encourages communication between data owners, stewards, and compliance officers to ensure that data governance practices are consistent across the institution.

4. Enhancing Operational Efficiency

Manual processes in data governance can be time-consuming and prone to errors, making it challenging for banks to keep pace with the growing volumes of data and increasing regulatory demands. The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s platform automates and streamlines key aspects of data governance, allowing banks to work more efficiently and focus on higher-value tasks.

Automation of Compliance Monitoring: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform automates compliance checks, data audits, and reporting, which reduces the manual workload for compliance teams. Automated alerts and reports help banks quickly identify potential non-compliance issues and rectify them before they escalate.
Workflow Automation: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform enables banks to automate workflows around data governance processes, including data classification, metadata updates, and access management. By streamlining these workflows, The Actian Data Intelligence Platform ensures that banks can efficiently manage their data governance tasks without relying on manual intervention.
Data Access Control: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform helps banks define and enforce fine-grained access controls for sensitive data. With The Actian Data Intelligence Platform’s robust access control mechanisms, banks can ensure that only authorized personnel can access specific data, reducing the risk of data misuse and enhancing operational security.

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform and the Banking Industry: A Perfect Partnership

The banking industry faces a range of complex data governance challenges. To navigate these challenges, they need robust data governance frameworks and powerful tools to help manage their vast data assets.

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform offers a comprehensive data governance solution that helps financial institutions tackle these challenges head-on. By providing automated compliance monitoring, metadata tracking, data lineage, and a centralized data catalog, the platform ensures that banks can meet regulatory requirements while improving operational efficiency, data transparency, and data integrity.

Actian offers an online product tour of the Actian Data Intelligence Platform as well as personalized demos of how the data intelligence platform can transform and enhance financial institutions’ data strategies.

About Actian Corporation

Actian empowers enterprises to confidently manage and govern data at scale. Actian data intelligence solutions help streamline complex data environments and accelerate the delivery of AI-ready data. Designed to be flexible, Actian solutions integrate seamlessly and perform reliably across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. Learn more about Actian, the data division of HCLSoftware, at actian.com.

Data Management

The Role of Data Stewards in Data Governance

Actian Corporation

June 16, 2025

Data has evolved from a byproduct of business operations into a strategic asset — one that demands thoughtful oversight and intentional governance. As organizations increasingly rely on data to drive decisions, compliance, and innovation, the role of the data steward has taken on new urgency and importance.

Data stewards are responsible for managing the quality and accessibility of data within an organization. They play a critical role in ensuring that data governance policies are followed and that data is properly utilized across the organization. In this article, we will explore the role of data stewards, their responsibilities, and how platforms like the Actian Data Intelligence Platform can help streamline and optimize their efforts in managing data governance.

What is Data Stewardship?

Data stewardship refers to the practice of defining, managing, overseeing, and ensuring the quality of data and data assets within an organization. It is a fundamental aspect of data governance, which is a broader strategy for managing data across the organization in a way that ensures compliance, quality, security, and value. While data governance focuses on the overall structure, policies, and rules for managing data, data stewardship is the hands-on approach to ensuring that those policies are adhered to and that data is kept accurate, consistent, and reliable.

The Role and Responsibilities of Data Stewards

Data stewards are the custodians of an organization’s data. They are the bridge between technical teams and business users, ensuring that data meets the needs of the organization while adhering to governance and regulatory standards.

Below are some of the key responsibilities of data stewards within a data governance framework.

1. Data Quality Management

Data stewards ensure data quality across the organization. They ensure data is accurate, consistent, complete, and up to date. They are tasked with establishing data quality standards and monitoring data to ensure that it meets these criteria. Data stewards are also responsible for identifying and addressing data quality issues, such as duplicates, missing data, or inconsistencies.

2. Data Classification and Categorization

Data stewards are responsible for organizing and classifying data—applying metadata, managing access controls, and ensuring sensitive information is properly handled—to make data accessible, understandable, and secure for stakeholders.

3. Data Governance Compliance

Data stewards ensure that the organization follows data governance policies and procedures. They monitor and enforce compliance with data governance standards and regulatory requirements such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA.

4. Data Access and Usage Monitoring

Data stewards define and enforce data access policies, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive or restricted data. They also monitor for violations of governance policy.

5. Data Lifecycle Management

Data stewards oversee the entire data lifecycle, from creation and storage to deletion and archiving.

6. Collaboration With Data Governance Stakeholders

Data stewards work closely with stakeholders in the data governance ecosystem, including data owners, data engineers, business analysts, and IT teams. They ensure that data governance practices are aligned with business goals. Data stewards are responsible for bridging the gap between technical and business teams, ensuring that the data is aligned with both technical requirements and business objectives.

7. Reporting and Documentation

Data stewards are responsible for documenting data governance policies, standards, and procedures. This documentation is essential for audits, regulatory compliance, and internal training.

Actian Data Intelligence Platform Makes Data Stewardship Easier

Data stewards play a crucial role in the success of an organization’s data governance framework. They are responsible for managing data quality, ensuring compliance, monitoring data access, and maintaining data integrity. By leveraging the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, data stewards can streamline their responsibilities and more effectively govern data across the organization.

With the platform’s centralized data catalog, automated data quality monitoring, data lineage tracking, and compliance tools, data stewards are empowered to maintain high-quality data, ensure regulatory compliance, and foster collaboration between stakeholders.

Request a personalized demo of the Actian Data Intelligence Platform today.

About Actian Corporation

Data Governance

From Silos to Self-Service: Data Governance in the AI Era

Nick Johnson

June 12, 2025

from silos to self-service data governance in the ai era

As enterprises double down on AI, many are discovering an uncomfortable truth: their biggest barrier isn’t technology—it’s their data governance model.

While 79% of corporate strategists rank AI and analytics as critical, Gartner predicts that 60% will fall short of their goals because their governance frameworks can’t keep up.

Siloed data, ad hoc quality practices, and reactive compliance efforts create bottlenecks that stifle innovation and limit effective data governance. The future demands a different approach: data treated as a product, governance embedded in data processes including self-service experiences, and decentralized teams empowered by active metadata and intelligent automation.

From Data Silos to Data Products: Why Change is Urgent

Traditional data governance frameworks were not designed for today’s reality. Enterprises operate across hundreds, sometimes thousands, of data sources: cloud warehouses, lakehouses, SaaS applications, on-prem systems, and AI models all coexist in sprawling ecosystems.

Without a modern approach to managing and governing data, silos proliferate. Governance becomes reactive—enforced after problems occur—rather than proactive. And AI initiatives stumble when teams are unable to find trusted, high-quality data at the speed the business demands.

Treating data as a product offers a way forward. Instead of managing data purely as a siloed, domain-specific asset, organizations shift toward delivering valuable and trustworthy data products to internal and external consumers. Each data product has an owner and clear expectations for quality, security, and compliance.

This approach connects governance directly to business outcomes—driving more accurate analytics, more precise AI models, and faster, more confident decision-making.

Enabling Domain-Driven Governance: Distributed, Not Fragmented

Achieving this future requires rethinking the traditional governance model. Centralized governance teams alone cannot keep pace with the volume, variety, and velocity of data creation. Nor can fully decentralized models, where each domain sets its own standards without alignment.

The answer is federated governance, a model in which responsibility is distributed to domain teams but coordinated through a shared framework of policies, standards, and controls.

In a federated model:

Domain teams own their data products, from documentation to quality assurance to access management.
Central governance bodies set enterprise-wide guardrails, monitor compliance, and enable collaboration across domains.
Data intelligence platforms serve as the connective tissue, providing visibility, automation, and context across the organization.

This balance of autonomy and alignment ensures that governance scales with the organization—without becoming a bottleneck to innovation.

The Rise of Active Metadata and Intelligent Automation

Active metadata is the fuel that powers modern governance. Unlike traditional data catalogs and metadata repositories, which are often static and siloed, active metadata is dynamic, continuously updated, and operationalized into business processes.

By tapping into active metadata, organizations can:

Automatically capture lineage, quality metrics, and usage patterns across diverse systems.
Enforce data contracts between producers and consumers to ensure shared expectations.
Enable intelligent access controls based on data sensitivity, user role, and regulatory requirements.
Proactively detect anomalies, schema changes, and policy violations before they cause downstream issues.

When governance processes are fueled by real-time, automated metadata, they no longer slow the business down—they accelerate it.

Embedding Governance into Everyday Work

The ultimate goal of modern governance is to make high-quality data products easily discoverable, understandable, and usable, without requiring users to navigate bureaucratic hurdles.

This means embedding governance into self-service experiences with:

Enterprise data marketplaces where users browse, request, and access data products with clear SLAs and usage guidelines.
Business glossaries that standardize and enforce consistent data definitions across domains.
Interactive lineage visualizations that trace data from its source through each transformation stage in the pipeline.
Automated data access workflows that enforce granular security controls while maintaining compliance.

In this model, governance becomes an enabler, not an obstacle, to data-driven work.

Observability: Enabling Ongoing Trust

Data observability is a vital component of data governance for AI because it ensures the quality, integrity, and transparency of the data that powers AI models. By integrating data observability, organizations reduce AI failure rates, accelerate time-to-insight, and maintain alignment between model behavior.

Data observability improves data intelligence and helps to:

Ensure high-quality data is used for AI model training by continuously monitoring data pipelines, quickly detecting anomalies, errors, or bias before they impact AI outputs.
Provide transparency and traceability of data flow and transformations, which is essential for building trust, ensuring regulatory compliance, and demonstrating accountability in AI systems.
Reduce model bias by monitoring data patterns and lineage; data observability helps identify and address potential biases in datasets and model outputs. This is key to ensuring AI systems are fair, ethical, and do not perpetuate discrimination.
Improve model explainability by making it easier to understand and explain AI model behavior, providing insights into the data and features that influence model predictions.

Building for the Future: Adaptability is Key

The pace of technological change—especially in AI, machine learning, and data infrastructure—shows no signs of slowing. Regulatory environments are also evolving rapidly, from GDPR to CCPA to emerging AI-specific legislation.

To stay ahead, organizations must build governance frameworks with data intelligence tools that are flexible by design:

Flexible metamodeling capabilities to customize governance models as business needs evolve.
Open architectures that connect seamlessly across new and legacy systems.
Scalable automation to handle growing data volumes without growing headcount.
Cross-functional collaboration between governance, engineering, security, and business teams.

By building adaptability into the core of their governance strategy, enterprises can future-proof their investments and support innovation for years to come.

Conclusion: Turning Governance into a Competitive Advantage

Data governance is no longer about meeting minimum compliance requirements—it’s about driving business value and building a data-driven culture. Organizations that treat data as a product, empower domains with ownership, and activate metadata across their ecosystems will set the pace for AI-driven innovation. Those that rely on outdated, centralized models will struggle with slow decision-making, mounting risks, and declining trust. The future will be led by enterprises that embed governance into the fabric of how data is created, shared, and consumed—turning trusted data into a true business advantage.

About Nick Johnson

Nick Johnson is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Actian, driving the go-to-market success for HCL Informix and Actian Zen. With a career dedicated to shaping compelling messages and strategies for databases, Nick brings a wealth of experience from his impactful work at leading technology companies, including Neo4j, Microsoft, and SAS.

Data Management

Data Owner vs. Data Steward: What’s the Difference?

Actian Corporation

June 9, 2025

Companies rely on data to make strategic decisions, improve operations, and drive innovation. However, with the growing volume and complexity of data, managing and maintaining its integrity, accessibility, and security has become a major challenge.

This is where the roles of data owners and data stewards come into play. Both are essential in the realm of data governance, but their responsibilities, focus areas, and tasks differ. Understanding the distinction between data owner vs. data steward is crucial for developing a strong data governance framework.

This article explores the differences between data owners and data stewards. It explains the importance of both roles in effective data management and shares how Actian can help both data owners and data stewards collaborate and manage data governance more efficiently.

What is a Data Owner?

A data owner is the individual or team within an organization who is ultimately responsible for a specific set of data. The data owner is typically a senior leader, department head, or business unit leader who has the authority over data within their domain.

Data owners are accountable for the data’s security, compliance, and overall business value. They are responsible for ensuring that data is used appropriately, securely, and per organizational policies and regulations.

Key responsibilities of a data owner include:

Accountability for Data Security: Data owners are responsible for ensuring that data is protected and secure. This includes managing access permissions, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA, and working with IT teams to prevent data breaches.
Defining Data Usage: Data owners determine how their data should be used within the organization. They help define the policies and rules that govern how data is accessed and shared, ensuring that data serves business needs without exposing the organization to risk.
Compliance and Regulatory Requirements: Data owners must ensure that their data complies with relevant regulations and industry standards. They oversee audits and ensure that proper documentation and controls are in place to meet compliance requirements.
Data Strategy Alignment: Data owners work closely with organizational leadership to ensure that the data aligns with broader business strategies and goals. They ensure that data is properly utilized to drive business growth, innovation, and decision-making.
Data Access Control: Data owners have the authority to define who can access their data. They set up permissions and manage user roles to ensure that only authorized individuals can access sensitive or critical data.

What is a Data Steward?

While the data owner holds the ultimate responsibility for the data, the data steward is the individual who takes a more operational role in managing, maintaining, and improving data quality. Data stewards typically handle the day-to-day management and governance of data, ensuring that it’s accurate, complete, and properly classified.

They act as the custodian of data within the organization, working closely with data owners and other stakeholders to ensure that data is used effectively across different teams and departments.

Key responsibilities of a data steward include:

Data Quality Management: Data stewards play a critical role in maintaining data quality. They are responsible for ensuring that data is accurate, complete, consistent, and up to date. This involves implementing data validation rules, monitoring data integrity, and addressing data quality issues as they arise.
Metadata Management: Data stewards manage the metadata associated with data. This includes defining data definitions, data types, and relationships between datasets and data assets. By organizing and maintaining metadata, data stewards ensure that data can be easily understood and accessed by anyone in the organization who needs it.
Data Classification and Standardization: Data stewards are involved in classifying data, tagging it with relevant metadata, and establishing data standards. This helps ensure that data is consistent, well-organized, and easily searchable.
Collaboration with Data Users: Data stewards often work closely with data users, such as analysts, data scientists, and business units, to understand their needs and provide them with the appropriate resources. They help ensure that data is accessible, usable, and meets the specific needs of different departments.
Data Lineage and Documentation: Data stewards maintain records of data lineage, which track the flow and transformation of data from its source to its destination. This helps ensure traceability and transparency, allowing users to understand where data comes from and how it has been modified over time.

Data Owner vs. Data Steward: Key Differences

While both data owners and data stewards are essential to effective data governance, their roles differ in terms of focus, responsibilities, and authority. Below is a comparison of data owner vs. data steward roles to highlight their distinctions:

	Data Owner	Data Steward
Primary Responsibility	Overall accountability for data governance and security.	Day-to-day management, quality, and integrity of data.
Focus	Strategic alignment, compliance, data usage, and access control.	Operational focus on data quality, metadata management, and classification.
Authority	Holds decision-making power on how data is used and shared.	Executes policies and guidelines set by data owners, ensures data quality.
Collaboration	Works with senior leadership, IT, legal, and compliance teams.	Works with data users, IT teams, and data owners to maintain data quality.
Scope	Oversees entire datasets or data domains.	Focuses on the practical management and stewardship of data within domains.

Why Both Roles are Essential in Data Governance

Data owners and data stewards play complementary roles in maintaining a strong data governance framework. The success of data governance depends on a clear division of responsibilities between these roles:

Data owners provide strategic direction, ensuring that data aligns with business goals, complies with regulations, and is properly secured.
Data stewards ensure that the data is usable, accurate, and accessible on a daily basis, helping to operationalize the governance policies set by the data owners.

Together, they create a balance between high-level oversight and hands-on data management. This ensures that data is not only protected and compliant but also accessible, accurate, and valuable for the organization.

How Actian Supports Data Owners and Data Stewards

Actian offers a powerful data governance platform designed to support both data owners and data stewards in managing their responsibilities effectively. It provides tools that empower both roles to maintain high-quality, compliant, and accessible data while streamlining collaboration between these key stakeholders.

Here are six ways the Actian Data Intelligence Platform supports data owners and data stewards:

1. Centralized Data Governance

The centralized platform enables data owners and data stewards to manage their responsibilities in one place. Data owners can set governance policies, define data access controls, and ensure compliance with relevant regulations. Meanwhile, data stewards can monitor data quality, manage metadata, and collaborate with data users to maintain the integrity of data.

2. Data Lineage and Traceability

Data stewards can use the platform to track data lineage, providing a visual representation of how data flows through the organization. This transparency helps data stewards understand where data originates, how it’s transformed, and where it’s used, which is essential for maintaining data quality and ensuring compliance. Data owners can also leverage this lineage information to assess risk and ensure that data usage complies with business policies.

3. Metadata Management

Metadata management capabilities embedded in the platform allow data stewards to organize, manage, and update metadata across datasets. This ensures that data is well-defined and easily accessible for users. Data owners can use metadata to establish data standards and governance policies, ensuring consistency across the organization.

4. Automated Data Quality Monitoring

Data stewards can use the Actian Data Intelligence Platform to automate data quality checks, ensuring that data is accurate, consistent, and complete. By automating data quality monitoring, the platform reduces the manual effort required from data stewards and ensures that data remains high-quality at all times. Data owners can rely on these automated checks to assess the overall health of their data governance efforts.

5. Collaboration Tools

The platform fosters collaboration between data owners, data stewards, and other stakeholders through user-friendly tools. Both data owners and stewards can share insights, discuss data-related issues, and work together to address data governance challenges. This collaboration ensures that data governance policies are effectively implemented, and data is managed properly.

6. Compliance and Security

Data owners can leverage the platform to define access controls, monitor data usage, and ensure that data complies with industry regulations. Data stewards can use the platform to enforce these policies and maintain the security and integrity of data.

Data Owners and Stewards Can Tour the Platform to Experience Its Capabilities

Understanding the roles of data owner vs. data steward is crucial for establishing an effective data governance strategy. Data owners are responsible for the strategic oversight of data, ensuring its security, compliance, and alignment with business goals, while data stewards manage the day-to-day operations of data, focusing on its quality, metadata, and accessibility.

Actian supports both roles by providing a centralized platform for data governance, automated data quality monitoring, comprehensive metadata management, and collaborative tools. By enabling both data owners and data stewards to manage their responsibilities effectively, the platform helps organizations maintain high-quality, compliant, and accessible data, which is essential for making informed, data-driven decisions.

Tour the Actian Data Intelligence Platform or schedule a personalized demonstration of its capabilities today.

About Actian Corporation

Data Governance

Why Every Data-Driven Business Needs a Data Intelligence Platform

Dee Radh

June 3, 2025

why every data-driven business needs a data intelligence platform

As data users can attest, success doesn’t come from having more data. It comes from having the right data. Yet for many organizations, finding this data can feel like trying to locate a specific book in a library without a catalog. You know the information is there, but without an organized way to locate it, you’re stuck guessing, hunting, or duplicating work. That’s where a data intelligence platform comes into play. This powerful but often underappreciated tool helps you organize, understand, and trust your data.

Whether you’re building AI applications, launching new analytics initiatives, or ensuring you meet compliance requirements, a well-implemented data intelligence platform can be the difference between success and frustration. That’s why they’ve become critical for modern businesses that want to ensure data products are easily searchable and available for all users.

What is a Data Intelligence Platform?

At its core, a data intelligence platform offers a centralized inventory of your organization’s data assets. Think of it as a searchable index that helps data consumers—like analysts, data scientists, business users, and engineers—discover, understand, and trust the data they’re working with.

A data intelligence platform goes far beyond simple documentation and is more than a list of datasets. It’s an intelligent, dynamic system that organizes, indexes, and contextualizes your data assets across the enterprise. For innovative companies that rely on data to drive decisions, power AI initiatives, and deliver trusted business outcomes, it’s quickly becoming indispensable.

With a modern data intelligence platform, you benefit from:

Federated knowledge graph. Gain better search results—as simple as shopping on an online e-commerce site—along with visualization of data relationships, and enhanced data exploration
Robust metadata harvesting automation. See your entire data landscape, reduce manual documentation efforts, ensure current metadata, and power data discovery.
Graph-based business glossary. Drive GenAI and other use cases with high-quality business context, ensure consistent terminology across your organization, accelerate insights, and enable semantic search capabilities.
Smart data lineage. Have visibility into where data comes from, how it changes, and where it goes. Up-to-date lineage enhances compliance and governance while improving root cause analysis of data quality issues.
Unified data catalog and marketplace. Use Google-like search capabilities to locate and access data for intuitive user experiences, while ensuring governance with permission-controlled data products.
Ready-to-use data products and contracts. Accelerate data democratization, support governance without compromising agility, create contracts only when relevant data products exist, and support a shift-left approach to data quality and governance.
Comprehensive data quality and observability. Reduce data quality incidents, experience faster issue resolution and remediation, increase your trust in data products, and benefit from proactive quality management instead of firefighting issues.
AI + knowledge graph. Leverage the powerful combination to manage metadata, improve data discovery, and fuel agentic AI.

The result is a single source of truth that supports data discovery, fosters trust in data, and promotes governance without slowing innovation. Simply stated, a data intelligence platform connects people to trusted data. In today’s business environment when data volume, variety, and velocity are all exploding, that connection is critical.

5 Reasons Data Intelligence Platforms Matter More Than Ever

Traditional approaches to data management are quickly becoming obsolete because they cannot keep pace with fast-growing data volumes and new sources. You need a smart, fast way to make data available and usable—without losing control. Here’s how data intelligence platforms help:

Eliminate data silos. One of the biggest challenges facing enterprises today is fragmentation. Data lives in multiple systems across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Without a data intelligence platform, it’s hard to know what data exists, let alone who owns it, how it’s being used, or whether it can be trusted.

A data intelligence platform creates a single view of all enterprise data assets. It breaks down silos and enables better collaboration between business and IT teams.

Accelerate analytics and AI. When analysts or data scientists spend more time finding, cleaning, or validating data than using it, productivity and innovation suffer. A data intelligence platform not only reduces time-to-insights but improves the quality of those insights by ensuring users start with accurate, trusted, connected data.

For AI initiatives, the value is even greater. Models are only as good as the data they’re trained on. Data intelligence platforms make it easier to identify high-quality, AI-ready data and track its lineage to ensure transparency and compliance.

Enable Governance Without Slowing Processes. Organizations must meet data privacy regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. A data intelligence platform can help teams understand where sensitive data resides, who has access to it, and how it flows across systems.

Unlike traditional governance methods, a data intelligence platform doesn’t create bottlenecks. It supports self-service access while enforcing data policies behind the scenes—balancing control and agility.

Drive Trust and Data Literacy. One of the most underrated benefits of a data intelligence platform is cultural. By making data more transparent, accessible, and understandable, data intelligence platforms empower all users across your business, not just data specialists.

Data intelligence platforms often include business glossaries and definitions, helping users interpret data correctly and leverage it confidently. That’s a huge step toward building a data-literate organization.

Empower Self-Service Analytics. A well-implemented data intelligence platform enables business users to search for and use data without waiting for IT or data teams to step in. This reduces delays and enables more people across the organization to make data-informed decisions.

When users can confidently find and understand the data they need, they’re more likely to contribute to data-driven initiatives. This democratization of data boosts agility and fosters a culture of innovation where teams across departments can respond faster to market changes, customer needs, and operational challenges. A data intelligence platform turns data from a bottleneck into a catalyst for smarter, faster decisions.

Real-World Data Intelligence Platform Use Cases

Here are a few ways organizations are using data intelligence platforms:

A healthcare provider tracks patient data across systems and ensures compliance with health data privacy laws. Metadata tagging helps the compliance team identify where sensitive information lives and how it’s accessed.
A retail company accelerates analytics for marketing campaigns. Data analysts can quickly find the most up-to-date product, pricing, and customer data, without waiting for IT support.
A financial services firm relies on data lineage features in its data intelligence platform to trace the origin of critical reports. This audit trail helps the firm maintain regulatory compliance and improves internal confidence in reporting.
In manufacturing, engineers and analysts explore equipment data, maintenance logs, and quality metrics across systems to identify patterns that can reduce downtime and improve efficiency.

As more organizations embrace hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, data intelligence platforms are becoming part of an essential infrastructure for trusted, scalable data operations.

Optimize a Data Intelligence Platform

Implementing and fully leveraging a data intelligence platform isn’t just about buying the right technology. It requires the right strategy, governance, and user engagement. These tips can help you get started:

Define your goals and scope. Determine if you want to support self-service analytics, improve governance, prepare for AI initiatives, or undertake other use cases.
Start small, then scale. Focus on high-impact use cases first to build momentum and show value early, then scale your success.
Engage both business and technical users. A data intelligence platform is more than an IT tool and should be usable and provide value to business teams, too.
Automate metadata collection. Manual processes will not scale. Look for a data intelligence platform that can automatically keep metadata up to date.
Focus on data quality and observability. A platform is only as good as the data it manages. Integrate quality checks and data lineage tools to make sure users can trust what they find.

In a data-driven business, having data isn’t enough. You need to find it, trust it, and use it quickly and confidently. A modern data intelligence platform makes this possible.

Actian’s eBook “10 Traps to Avoid for a Successful Data Catalog Project” is a great resource to implement and fully optimize a modern solution. It provides practical guidance to help you avoid common pitfalls, like unclear ownership, low adoption rates for users, or underestimating data complexity, so your project delivers maximum value.

About Dee Radh

As Senior Director of Product Marketing, Dee Radh heads product marketing for Actian. Prior to that, she held senior PMM roles at Talend and Formstack. Dee has spent 100% of her career bringing technology products to market. Her expertise lies in developing strategic narratives and differentiated positioning for GTM effectiveness. In addition to a post-graduate diploma from the University of Toronto, Dee has obtained certifications from Pragmatic Institute, Product Marketing Alliance, and Reforge. Dee is based out of Toronto, Canada.

Data Observability

Beyond Visibility: How Actian Data Observability Redefines the Standard

Phil Ostroff

June 2, 2025

In today’s data-driven world, ensuring data quality, reliability, and trust has become a mission-critical priority. But as enterprises scale, many observability tools fall short, introducing blind spots, spiking cloud costs, or compromising compliance.

Actian Data Observability changes the game.

This blog explores how Actian’s next-generation observability capabilities outperform our competitors, offering unmatched scalability, cost-efficiency, and precision for modern enterprises.

Why Data Observability Matters Now More Than Ever

Data observability enables organizations to:

Detect data issues before they impact dashboards or models.
Build trust in analytics, AI, and regulatory reporting.
Maintain pipeline SLAs in complex architectures.
Reduce operational risk, rework, and compliance exposure.

Yet most tools still trade off depth for speed or precision for price. Actian takes a fundamentally different approach, offering full coverage without compromise.

What Actian Data Observability Provides

Actian Data Observability delivers on four pillars of enterprise value:

1. Achieve Proactive Data Reliability

Actian shifts data teams from reactive firefighting to proactive assurance. Through continuous monitoring, intelligent anomaly detection, and automated diagnostics, the solution enables teams to catch and often resolve data issues before they reach downstream systems—driving data trust at every stage of the pipeline.

2. Gain Predictable Cloud Economics

Unlike tools that cause unpredictable cost spikes from repeated scans and data movement, Actian’s zero-copy, workload-isolated architecture ensures stable, efficient operation. Customers benefit from low total cost of ownership without compromising coverage or performance.

3. Boost Data Team Productivity and Efficiency

Actian empowers data engineers and architects to “shift left”—identifying issues early in the pipeline and automating tedious tasks like validation, reconciliation, and monitoring. This significantly frees up technical teams to focus on value-added activities, from schema evolution to data product development.

4. Scale Confidently With Architectural Freedom

Built for modern, composable data stacks, Actian Data Observability integrates seamlessly with cloud data warehouses, lakehouses, and open table formats. Its decoupled architecture scales effortlessly—handling thousands of data quality checks in parallel without performance degradation. With native Apache Iceberg support, it’s purpose-built for next-gen data platforms.

Actian Data Observability: What Sets it Apart

Actian Data Observability stands apart from its competitors in several critical dimensions. Most notably, Actian is the only platform that guarantees 100% data coverage without sampling, whereas tools from other vendors often rely on partial or sampled datasets, increasing the risk of undetected data issues. Additional vendors, while offering tools strong in governance, do not focus on observability and lacks this capability entirely.

In terms of cost control, Actian Data Observability uniquely offers a “no cloud cost surge” guarantee. Its architecture ensures compute efficiency and predictable cloud billing, unlike some vendors which can trigger high scan fees and unpredictable cost overruns. Smaller vendors’ pricing models are still maturing and may not be transparent at scale.

Security and governance are also core strengths for Actian. Its secured zero-copy architecture enables checks to run in-place—eliminating the need for risky or costly data movement. In contrast, other vendors typically require data duplication or ingestion into their own environments. Others offer partial support here, but often with tradeoffs in performance or integration complexity.

When it comes to scaling AI/ML workloads for observability, Actian’s models are designed for high-efficiency enterprise use, requiring less infrastructure and tuning. Some other models, while powerful, can be compute-intensive. Others offer moderate scalability, and have limited native ML support in this context.

A standout differentiator is Actian’s native support for Apache Iceberg—a first among observability platforms. While others are beginning to explore Iceberg compatibility, Actian’s deep, optimized integration provides immediate value for organizations adopting or standardizing on Iceberg. Many other vendors currently offer no meaningful support here.

Finally, Actian Data Observability’s decoupled data quality engine enables checks to scale independently of production pipelines—preserving performance while ensuring robust coverage. This is a clear edge over some other solutions, who tightly couple checks with pipeline workflows.

Why Modern Observability Capabilities Matter

Most observability tools were built for a different era—before Iceberg, before multi-cloud, and before ML-heavy data environments. As the stakes rise, the bar for observability must rise too.

Actian meets that bar. And then exceeds it.

With full data coverage, native modern format support, and intelligent scaling—all while minimizing risk and cost—Actian Data Observability is not just a tool. It’s the foundation for data trust at scale.

Final Thoughts

If you’re evaluating data observability tools and need:

Enterprise-grade scalability.
Modern format compatibility (Iceberg, Parquet, Delta).
ML-driven insights without resource drag.
Secure, in-place checks.
Budget-predictable deployment.

Then Actian Data Observability deserves a serious look.

Learn more about how we can help you build trusted data pipelines—at scale, with confidence.

About Phil Ostroff

Phil Ostroff is Director of Competitive Intelligence at Actian, leveraging 30+ years of experience across automotive, healthcare, IT security, and more. Phil identifies market gaps to ensure Actian's data solutions meet real-world business demands, even in niche scenarios. He has led cross-industry initiatives that streamlined data strategies for diverse enterprises. Phil's Actian blog contributions offer insights into competitive trends, customer pain points, and product roadmaps. Check out his articles to stay informed on market dynamics.

Data Intelligence

Shedding Light on Dark Data With Actian Data Intelligence

Phil Ostroff

May 30, 2025

In a world where data is the new oil, most enterprises still operate in the dark—literally. Estimates suggest that up to 80% of enterprise data remains “dark”: unused, unknown, or invisible to teams that need it most. Dark Data is the untapped information collected through routine business activities but left unanalyzed—think unused log files, untagged cloud storage, redundant CRM fields, or siloed operational records.

Understanding and managing this type of data isn’t just a matter of hygiene—it’s a competitive imperative. Dark Data obscures insights, introduces compliance risk, and inflates storage costs. Worse, it erodes trust in enterprise data, making transformation efforts slower and costlier.

That’s where the Actian Data Intelligence Platform stands apart. While many solutions focus narrowly on metadata governance or data quality alone, Actian’s integrated approach is engineered to help you surface, understand, and operationalize your hidden data assets with precision and speed.

What Makes Dark Data so Difficult to Find?

Traditional data catalogs offer discovery—but only for data already known or documented. Data observability tools track quality—but typically only for data actively moving through pipelines. This leaves a blind spot: static, historical, or misclassified data, often untouched by either tool.

That’s the problem with relying on siloed solutions offered by other vendors. These platforms may excel at metadata management but often lack deep integration with real-time anomaly detection, making them blind to decaying or rogue data sources. Similarly, standalone observability tools identify schema drifts and freshness issues but don’t reveal the context or lineage needed to re-integrate that data.

The Actian Advantage: Unified Catalog + Observability

Actian Data Intelligence Platform closes this gap. By combining metadata management and data observability, the platform, when combined with Actian Data Observability, offers a dual-lens approach:

Discover Beyond the Known: Actian goes beyond surface-level metadata, crawling and indexing both structured and semi-structured data assets—regardless of their popularity or usage frequency.
Assess Quality in Real-Time: Actian ensures that every discovered asset isn’t just visible—it’s trustworthy. AI/ML-driven anomaly detection, schema change alerts, and data drift analysis provide full transparency.
Drive Business Context: The Actian Data Intelligence Platform connects data to business terms, ownership, and lineage—empowering informed decisions about what to govern, retire, or monetize.

Compared to the Market: Why Actian is Different

Most platforms only solve part of the Dark Data challenge. Here are five ways the Actian Data Intelligence Platform stands apart:

Comprehensive Metadata Discovery:

Other Solutions: Offer strong metadata capture, but often require heavy configuration and manual onboarding. They might also focus purely on observability, with no discovery of new or undocumented assets.
Actian: Automatically scans and catalogs all known and previously hidden assets—structured or semi-structured—without relying on prior documentation.

Real-Time Data Quality Monitoring:

Other Solutions: Little to no active data quality assessment or reliance on external tools. They provide robust data quality and anomaly detection, but without metadata context.
Actian: Integrates observability directly into the platform—flagging anomalies, schema drifts, and trust issues as they happen.

Dark Data Discovery:

Other Solutions: May uncover some dark data through manual exploration or lineage tracking, but lack automation. Or, they may not address dark or dormant data at all.
Actian: Actively surfaces hidden, forgotten, or misclassified data assets—automatically and with rich context.

Unified and Integrated Platform:

Other Solutions: Often a patchwork of modular tools or loosely integrated partners.
Actian: Offers a cohesive, natively integrated platform combining cataloging and observability in one seamless experience.

Rich Business Context and Lineage:

Other Solutions: Provide lineage and business glossaries, but often complex for end-users to adopt.
Actian: Automatically maps data to business terms, ownership, and downstream usage—empowering both technical and business users.

Lighting the Path Forward

Dark Data is more than a nuisance—it’s a barrier to agility, trust, and innovation. As enterprises strive for data-driven cultures, tools that only address part of the problem are no longer enough.

Actian Data Intelligence Platform, containing both metadata management and data observability, provides a compelling and complete solution to discover, assess, and activate data across your environment—even the data you didn’t know you had. Don’t just manage your data—illuminate it.

Find out more about Actian’s data observability capabilities.

About Phil Ostroff

Data Governance

Data Quality and Data Observability: Why You Need Both

Actian Corporation

May 26, 2025

As data becomes more central to decision making, two priorities are taking precedence for data leaders: data quality and data observability. Each plays a distinct role in maintaining the reliability, accuracy, and compliance of enterprise data.

When used together, data quality and data observability provide a powerful foundation for delivering trustworthy data for AI and other use cases. With data systems experiencing rapidly growing data volumes, organizations are finding that this growth is leading to increased data complexity.

Data pipelines often span a wide range of sources, formats, systems, and applications. Without the right tools and frameworks in place, even small data issues can quickly escalate—leading to inaccurate reports, flawed models, and costly compliance violations.

Gartner notes that by 2026, 50% of enterprises implementing distributed data architectures will have adopted data observability tools to improve visibility over the state of the data landscape, up from less than 20% in 2024. Here’s how data quality and observability help organizations:

Build Trust and Have Confidence in Data Quality

Every business decision that stakeholders make hinges on the trustworthiness of their data. When data is inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent, or outdated, that trust is broken. For example, incomplete data can negatively impact the patient experience in healthcare, or false positives in credit card transactions that incorrectly flag a purchase as fraudulent erode customer confidence and trust.

That’s why a well-designed data quality framework is foundational. It ensures data is usable, accurate, and aligned with business needs.

With strong data quality processes in place, teams can:

Identify and correct errors early in the pipeline.
Ensure data consistency across various systems.
Monitor critical dimensions such as completeness, accuracy, and freshness.
Align data with governance and compliance requirements.

Embedding quality checks throughout the data lifecycle allows teams and stakeholders to make decisions with confidence. That’s because they can trust the data behind every report, dashboard, and model. When organizations layer data observability into their quality framework, they gain real-time visibility into their data’s health, helping to detect and resolve issues before they impact decision making.

Meet Current and Evolving Data Demands

Traditional data quality tools and manual processes often fall short when applied to large-scale data environments. Sampling methods or surface-level checks may catch obvious issues, but they frequently miss deeper anomalies—and rarely reveal the root cause.

As data environments grow in volume and complexity, the data quality architecture must scale with it. That means:

Monitoring all data, not just samples.
Validating across diverse data types and formats.
Integrating checks into data processes and workflows.
Supporting open data formats.

Organizations need solutions that can handle quality checks across massive, distributed datasets. And these solutions cannot slow down production systems or cause cost inefficiencies. This is where a modern data observability solution delivers unparalleled value.

Comprehensive Data Observability as a Quality Monitor

To understand the powerful role of data observability, think of it as a real-time sensor layer across an organization’s data pipelines. It continuously monitors pipeline health, detects anomalies, and identifies root causes before issues move downstream. Unlike static quality checks, observability offers proactive, always-on insights into the state of the organization’s data.

A modern data observability solution, like Actian Data Observability, adds value to a data quality framework:

Automated anomaly detection. Identify issues in data quality, freshness, and custom business rules without manual intervention.
Root cause analysis. Understand where and why issues occurred, enabling faster resolution.
Continuous monitoring. Ensure pipeline integrity and prevent data errors from impacting users.
No sampling blind spots. Monitor 100% of the organization’s data, not just a subset.

Sampling methods may seem cost-effective, but they can allow critical blind spots in data. For instance, an anomaly that only affects 2% of records might be missed entirely by the data team, until it breaks an AI model or leads to unexpected customer churn.

By providing 100% data coverage for comprehensive and accurate observability, Actian Data Observability eliminates blind spots and the risks associated with sampled data.

Why Organizations Need Data Quality and Observability

Companies don’t have to choose between data quality and data observability—they work together. When combined, they enable:

Proactive prevention, not reactively fixing issues.
Faster issue resolution, with visibility across the data lifecycle.
Increased trust, through continuous validation and transparency.
AI-ready data by delivering clean, consistent data.
Enhanced efficiency by reducing time spent identifying errors.

An inability to effectively monitor data quality, lineage, and access patterns increases the risk of regulatory non-compliance. This can result in financial penalties, reputational damage from data errors, and potential security breaches. Regulatory requirements make data quality not just a business imperative, but a legal one.

Implementing robust data quality practices starts with embedding automated checks throughout the data lifecycle. Key tactics include data validation to ensure data meets expected formats and ranges, duplicate detection to eliminate redundancies, and consistency checks across systems.

Cross-validation techniques can help verify data accuracy by comparing multiple sources, while data profiling uncovers anomalies, missing values, and outliers. These steps not only improve reliability but also serve as the foundation for automated observability tools to monitor, alert, and maintain trust in enterprise data.

Without full visibility and active data monitoring, it’s easy for errors, including those involving sensitive data, to go undetected until major problems or violations occur. Implementing data quality practices that are supported by data observability helps organizations:

Continuously validate data against policy requirements.
Monitor access, freshness, and lineage.
Automate alerts for anomalies, policy violations, or missing data.
Reduce the risk of compliance breaches and audits.

By building quality and visibility into data governance processes, organizations can stay ahead of regulatory demands.

Actian Data Observability Helps Ensure Data Reliability

Actian Data Observability is built to support large, distributed data environments where reliability, scale, and performance are critical. It provides full visibility across complex pipelines spanning cloud data warehouses, data lakes, and streaming systems.

Using AI and machine learning, Actian Data Observability proactively monitors data quality, detects and resolves anomalies, and reconciles data discrepancies. It allows organizations to:

Automatically surface root causes.
Monitor data pipelines using all data—without sampling.
Integrate observability into current data workflows.
Avoid the cloud cost spikes common with other tools.

Organizations that are serious about data quality need to think bigger than static quality checks or ad hoc dashboards. They need real-time observability to keep data accurate, compliant, and ready for the next use case.

Actian Data Observability delivers the capabilities needed to move from reactive problem-solving to proactive, confident data management. Find out how the solution offers observability for complex data architectures.

About Actian Corporation

Data Observability

Quality Data, Reliable AI: Introducing Actian Data Observability

Emma McGrattan

May 12, 2025

Summary

This blog introduces Actian’s Data Observability platform—a proactive, AI-powered solution designed to ensure data reliability, reduce cloud costs, and support trustworthy AI by monitoring 100% of data pipelines in real-time.

Proactive AI-powered monitoring prevents data issues: ML-driven anomaly detection identifies schema drift, outliers, and freshness problems early in the pipeline—before they impact downstream systems.
Predictable costs with full data coverage: Unlike sampling-based tools, Actian processes every data record on an isolated compute layer, delivering no-cost surge assurance and avoiding cloud bill spikes.
Flexible, open architecture for modern data stacks: Supports Apache Iceberg and integrates across data lakes, lakehouses, and warehouses without vendor lock-in or performance degradation on production systems.

The Real Cost of Reactive Data Quality

Gartner® estimates that “By 2026, 50% of enterprises implementing distributed data architectures will have adopted data observability tools to improve visibility over the state of the data landscape, up from less than 20% in 2024”. But data observability goes beyond monitoring—it’s a strategic enabler for building trust in data while controlling the rising data quality costs across the enterprise.

Today’s enterprise data stack is a patchwork of old and new technologies—complex, fragmented, and hard to manage. As data flows from ingestion to storage, transformation, and consumption, the risk of failure multiplies. Traditional methods can’t keep up anymore.

Data teams lose up to 40% of their time fighting fires instead of focusing on strategic value.
Cloud spend continues to surge, driven by inefficient and reactive approaches to data quality.
AI investments fall short when models are built on unreliable or incomplete data.
Compliance risks grow as organizations lack the visibility needed to trace and trust their data.

Today’s data quality approaches are stuck in the past:

1. The Legacy Problem

Traditional data quality methods have led to a perfect storm of inefficiency and blind spots. As data volumes scale, organizations struggle with manual rule creation, forcing engineers to build and maintain thousands of quality checks across fragmented systems. The result? A labor-intensive process that relies on selective sampling, leaving critical data quality issues undetected. At the same time, monitoring remains focused on infrastructure metrics—like CPU and memory—rather than the integrity of the data itself.

The result is fragmented visibility, where issues in one system can’t be connected to problems elsewhere—making root cause analysis nearly impossible. Data teams are stuck in a reactive loop, chasing downstream failures instead of preventing them at the source. This constant firefighting erodes productivity and, more critically, trust in the data that underpins key business decisions.

Manual, rule-based checks don’t scale—leaving most datasets unmonitored.
Sampling to cut costs introduces blind spots that put critical decisions at risk.
Monitoring infrastructure alone ignores what matters most: the data itself.
Disconnected monitoring tools prevent teams from seeing the full picture across pipelines.

2. The Hidden Budget Drain

The move to cloud data infrastructure was meant to optimize costs—but traditional observability approaches have delivered the opposite. As teams expand monitoring across their data stack, compute-intensive queries drive unpredictable cost spikes on production systems. With limited cost transparency, it’s nearly impossible to trace expenses or plan budgets effectively. As data scales, so do the costs—fast. Enterprises face a difficult choice: reduce monitoring and risk undetected issues, or maintain coverage and justify escalating cloud spend to finance leaders. This cost unpredictability is now a key barrier to adopting enterprise-grade data observability.

Inefficient processing drives excessive compute and storage costs.
Limited cost transparency makes optimization and budgeting a challenge.
Rising data volumes magnify costs, making scalability a growing concern.

3. The Architecture Bottleneck

Most data observability solutions create architectural handcuffs that severely limit an organization’s technical flexibility and scalability. These solutions are typically designed as tightly integrated components that become deeply embedded within specific cloud platforms or data technologies, forcing organizations into long-term vendor commitments and limiting future innovation options.

When quality checks are executed directly on production systems, they compete for critical resources with core business operations, often causing significant performance degradation during peak periods—precisely when reliability matters most. The architectural limitations force data teams to develop complex, custom engineering workarounds to maintain performance, creating technical debt and consuming valuable engineering resources.

Tightly coupled solutions that lock you into specific platforms.
Performance degradation when running checks on production systems.
Inefficient resource utilization requiring custom engineering.

Actian Brings a Fresh Approach to Data Reliability

Actian Data Observability represents a fundamental shift from reactive firefighting to proactive data reliability. Here’s how we’re different:

1. Proactive, Not Reactive

TRADITIONAL WAY: Discovering data quality issues after they’ve impacted business decisions.
ACTIAN WAY: AI-powered anomaly detection that catches issues early in the pipeline using ML-driven insights.

2. Predictable Cloud Economics

TRADITIONAL WAY: Unpredictable cloud bills that surge with data volume.
ACTIAN WAY: No-cost-surge guarantee with efficient architecture that optimizes resource consumption.

3. Complete Coverage, No Sampling

TRADITIONAL WAY: Sampling data to save costs, creating critical blind spots.
ACTIAN WAY: 100% data coverage without compromise through intelligent processing.

4. Architectural Freedom

TRADITIONAL WAY: Vendor lock-in with limited integration options.
ACTIAN WAY: Open architecture with native Apache Iceberg support and seamless integration across modern data stacks.

Real-World Impact

Use Case 1: Data Pipeline Efficiency With “Shift-Left”

Transform your data operations by catching issues at the source:

Implement comprehensive DQ checks at ingestion, transformation, and source stages.
Integrate with CI/CD workflows for data pipelines.
Reduce rework costs and accelerate time-to-value.

Use Case 2: GenAI Lifecycle Monitoring

Ensure your AI initiatives deliver business value:

Validate training data quality and RAG knowledge sources.
Monitor for hallucinations, bias, and performance drift.
Track model operational metrics in real-time.

Use Case 3: Safe Self-Service Analytics

Empower your organization with confident data exploration:

Embed real-time data health indicators in catalogs and BI tools.
Monitor dataset usage patterns proactively.
Build trust through transparency and validation.

The Actian Advantage: Five Differentiators That Matter

No Data Sampling: 100% data coverage for comprehensive observability.
No Cloud Cost Surge Guarantee: Predictable economics at scale.
Secured Zero-Copy Architecture: Access metadata without costly data copies.
Scalable AI Workloads: ML capabilities designed for enterprise scale.
Native Apache Iceberg Support: Unparalleled observability for modern table formats.

Get Started

Take a product tour and better understand how to transform your data operations from reactive chaos to proactive control.

About Emma McGrattan

Emma McGrattan is CTO at Actian, leading global R&D in high-performance analytics, data management, and integration. With over two decades at Actian, Emma holds multiple patents in data technologies and has been instrumental in driving innovation for mission-critical applications. She is a recognized authority, frequently speaking at industry conferences like Strata Data, and she's published technical papers on modern analytics. In her Actian blog posts, Emma tackles performance optimization, hybrid cloud architectures, and advanced analytics strategies. Explore her top articles to unlock data-driven success.

Data Governance

The Governance Gap: Why 60% of AI Initiatives Fail

Dee Radh

May 1, 2025

governance gap and why ai initiatives can fail

Summary

This blog presents a critical insight: without modern, proactive governance, a majority of AI initiatives will fail to deliver value. It explains what causes breakdowns and how federated, context-aware practices can close the “governance gap.”

Gartner projects that 60% of AI projects will miss their value targets by 2027 due to fragmented, reactive governance structures that don’t align with business objectives.
Common pitfalls include compliance-driven rollouts, siloed teams, and outdated tools, hindering scalability and strategic impact.
A modern solution involves federated data governance via active metadata, context-rich data catalogs, and “shift-left” stewardship at the source—empowering decentralized teams while ensuring oversight.

AI initiatives are surging, and so are the expectations. According to Gartner, nearly 8 in 10 corporate strategists see AI and analytics as critical to their success. Yet there’s a sharp disconnect: Gartner also predicts that by 2027, most organizations, 60%, will fail to realize the anticipated value of their AI use cases because of incohesive data governance frameworks.

What’s holding enterprises back isn’t intent or even IT investments. It’s ineffective data processes that impact quality and undermine trust. For too many organizations, data governance is reactive, fragmented, and disconnected from business priorities.

The solution isn’t more policies or manual controls. It’s modern technology, with a modern data catalog and data intelligence platform as the cornerstones. Modern catalogs can play a key role in data management and governance strategies.

Why Governance Efforts Fail

While many organizations strive toward and commit to better data governance, they often fall short of their goals. That’s because governance programs typically suffer from one of three common pitfalls:

They’re launched in response to compliance failures, not strategic goals.
They struggle to scale due to legacy tools and siloed teams.
They lack usable frameworks that empower data stewards and data users.

According to Gartner, the top challenges to establishing a data governance strategy include talent management (62%), establishing data management best practices (58%), and understanding third-party compliance (43%). With these issues at play, it’s no wonder that data governance remains more aspirational than operational.

Shifting this narrative requires organizations to embrace a modern approach to data governance. This approach entails decentralizing control to business domains, aligning governance with business use cases, and building trust and understanding of data among all users across the organization. That’s where a modern data catalog comes into play.

Going Beyond Traditional Data Catalogs

Traditional data catalogs can provide an inventory of data assets, but that only meets one business need. A modern data catalog goes much further by embedding data intelligence and adaptability into data governance, making it more beneficial and intuitive for users.

Here’s how:

Shift-Left Capabilities for Data Stewards

Moving data governance responsibility upstream can enable new benefits. This shift-left approach empowers data stewards at the source—where data is created and understood the best, supporting context-aware governance and decentralized data ownership.

With granular access controls, flexible metamodeling, and business glossaries, data stewards can apply governance policies when and where they make the most sense. The result? Policies that are more relevant, data that’s more reliable, and teams that gain data ownership and confidence, not friction or bottlenecks.

Federated Data Governance With Active Metadata

A modern data catalog supports federated governance by allowing teams to work within their own domains while maintaining shared standards. Through active metadata, data contracts, and data lineage visualization, organizations gain visibility and control of their data across distributed environments.

Rather than enforcing a rigid, top-down approach to governance, a modern catalog uses real-time insights, shared definitions, and a contextual understanding of data assets to support governance. This helps mitigate compliance risk and promotes more responsible data usage.

Adaptive Metamodeling for Evolving Business Needs

Governance frameworks must evolve as data ecosystems expand and regulations change. Smart data catalogs don’t force teams into a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, they enable custom approaches and metamodels that grow and adapt over time.

From supporting new data sources to aligning with emerging regulations, adaptability helps ensure governance keeps pace with the business, not the other way around. This also promotes governance across the organization, encouraging data users to see it as a benefit rather than a hurdle.

Support Effective Governance With the Right Tools

Adopting a modern data catalog isn’t just about using modern features. It’s also about providing good user experiences. That’s why for data governance to succeed, tools must integrate seamlessly and work intuitively for users at all skill levels.

This experience includes simplifying metadata collection and policy enforcement for IT and data stewards, and providing intuitive search and exploration capabilities that make data easy to find, understand, and trust for business users. For all groups of users, the learning curve should be short, encouraging data governance without being limited by complex processes.

By supporting all types of data producers and data consumers, a modern data catalog eliminates the silos that often stall governance programs. It becomes the connective tissue that aligns people, processes, and policies around a shared understanding of data.

Go From Data Governance Aspirations to Outcomes

Most organizations know that data governance is essential, yet few have the right tools and processes to fully operationalize it. By implementing a modern data catalog like the one from Actian, organizations can modernize their governance efforts, empower their teams, and deliver sustainable business value from their data assets.

Organizations need to ask themselves a fundamental question: “Can we trust our data?” With a modern data catalog and strong governance practices, the answer becomes a confident yes.

Find out how to ensure accessible and governed data for AI and other use cases by exploring our data intelligence platform with an interactive product tour or demo.

About Dee Radh

Data Management

Life in an Enterprise Data Team: Before and After Data Intelligence

Dee Radh

April 30, 2025

In the world of enterprise data management, there’s perhaps no image more viscerally recognizable to data professionals than the infamous “Rube Goldberg Data Architecture” diagram. With its tangled web of arrows connecting disparate systems, duplicate data repositories, and countless ETL jobs, it perfectly captures the reality many organizations face today: data chaos.

Life Before a Data Catalog

Imagine starting your Monday morning with an urgent request: “We need to understand how customer churn relates to support ticket resolution times.” Simple enough, right?

Without a data catalog or metadata management solution, your reality looks something like this:

The Dig

You start by asking colleagues which data sources might contain the information you need. Each person points you in a different direction. “Check the CRM system,” says one. “I think that’s in the marketing data lake,” says another. “No, we have a special warehouse for customer experience metrics,” chimes in a third.

The Chase

Hours are spent exploring various systems. You discover three different customer tables across separate data warehouses, each with slightly different definitions of what constitutes a “customer.” Which one is the source of truth? Nobody seems to know.

The Trust Crisis

After cobbling together data from multiple sources, you present your findings to stakeholders. Immediately, questions arise: “Are you sure this data is current?” “How do we know these calculations are consistent with the quarterly reports?” “Which department owns this metric?” Without clear lineage, business glossary or governance, confidence in your analysis plummets.

The Redundancy Trap

A week later, you discover a colleague in another department conducted almost identical analysis last month. Their results differ slightly from yours because they used a different data source. Both of you wasted time duplicating efforts, and now the organization has conflicting insights.

This scenario reflects what MIT Technology Review described in their article “Evolution of Intelligent Data Pipelines”: complex data environments with “thousands of data sources, feeding tens of thousands of ETL jobs.” The result is what Bill Schmarzo aptly illustrated – a Rube Goldberg machine of data processes that’s inefficient, unreliable, and ultimately undermines the strategic value of your data assets.

Enter the Data Catalog:

Now, let’s reimagine the same scenario with a data intelligence solution like Actian in place.

Knowledge Graph-Powered Discovery in Minutes, Not Days

That Monday morning request now begins with an intelligent search in your data catalog. Leveraging knowledge graph technology, the system understands semantic relationships between data assets and business concepts. Within moments, you’ve identified the authoritative customer data source and the precise metrics for support ticket resolution times. The search not only finds exact matches but understands related concepts, synonyms, and contextual meanings, surfacing relevant data you might not have known to look for.

Federated Catalogs With a Unified Business Glossary

Though data resides in multiple systems across your organization, the federated catalog presents a unified view. Every term has a clear definition in the business glossary, ensuring “customer” means the same thing across departments. This shared vocabulary eliminates confusion and creates a common language between technical and business teams, bridging the perennial gap between IT and business users.

Comprehensive Lineage and Context

Before running any analysis, you can trace the complete lineage of the data – seeing where it originated, what transformations occurred, and which business rules were applied. The catalog visually maps data flow across the entire enterprise architecture, from source systems through ETL processes to consumption endpoints. This end-to-end visibility provides critical context for your analysis and builds confidence in your results.

Integrated Data Quality and Observability

Quality metrics are embedded directly in the catalog, showing real-time scores for completeness, accuracy, consistency, and timeliness. Automated monitoring continuously validates data against quality rules, with historical trends visible alongside each asset. When anomalies are detected, the system alerts data stewards, while the lineage view helps quickly identify root causes of issues before they impact downstream analyses.

Data Products and Marketplace

You discover through the catalog that the marketing team has already created a data product addressing this exact need. In the data marketplace, you find ready-to-use analytics assets combining customer churn and support metrics, complete with documentation and trusted business logic. Each product includes clear data contracts defining the responsibilities of providers and consumers, service level agreements, and quality guarantees. Instead of building from scratch, you simply access these pre-built data products, allowing you to deliver insights immediately rather than starting another redundant analysis project.

Regulatory Compliance and Governance by Design

Questions about data ownership, privacy, and compliance are answered immediately. The catalog automatically flags sensitive data elements, shows which regulations apply (GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, etc.), and verifies your authorization to access specific fields. Governance is built into the discovery process itself – the system only surfaces data you’re permitted to use and provides clear guidance on appropriate usage, ensuring compliance by design rather than as an afterthought.

Augmented Data Stewardship

The catalog shows that the customer support director is the data owner for support metrics, that the data passed its most recent quality checks, and that usage of these specific customer fields is compliant with privacy regulations. Approval workflows, access requests, and policy management are integrated directly into the platform, streamlining governance processes while maintaining robust controls.

Discovery in Minutes, Not Days

That Monday morning request now begins with a quick search in your data catalog. Within moments, you’ve identified the authoritative customer data source and the precise metrics for support ticket resolution times. The system shows you which tables contain this information, complete with detailed descriptions.

Tangible Benefits

The MIT Technology Review article highlights how modern approaches to data management have evolved to address exactly these challenges, enabling “faster data operations through both abstraction and automation.” With proper metadata management, organizations experience:

Reduced time-to-insight: Analysts spend less time searching for data and more time extracting value from it
Enhanced data governance: Clear ownership, lineage, and quality metrics build trust in data assets
Automated data quality monitoring: The system continually observes and monitors data against defined quality rules, alerting teams when anomalies or degradation occur
SLAs and expectations: Clear data contracts between producers and consumers establish shared expectations about the usage and reliability of data products
Improved collaboration: Teams build on each other’s work rather than duplicating efforts
Greater agility: The business can respond faster to changing conditions with reliable data access

From Rube Goldberg to Renaissance

The “Rube Goldberg Data Architecture” doesn’t have to be your reality. As data environments grow increasingly complex, data intelligence solutions like Actian become essential infrastructure for modern data teams.

By implementing a robust data catalog, organizations can transform the tangled web depicted in Schmarzo’s illustration into an orderly, efficient ecosystem where data stewards and consumers spend their time generating insights, not hunting for elusive datasets or questioning the reliability of their findings.

The competitive advantage for enterprises doesn’t just come from having data – it comes from knowing your data. A comprehensive data intelligence solution isn’t just an operational convenience; it’s the foundation for turning data chaos into clarity and converting information into impact.

This blog post was inspired by Bill Schmarzo’s “Rube Goldberg Data Architecture” diagram and insights from MIT Technology Review’s article “Evolution of Intelligent Data Pipelines.”

About Dee Radh

Data Governance

Implementing Data Governance: A Step-by-Step Guide

Actian Corporation

April 25, 2025

Summary

This blog provides a clear, practical roadmap to building a successful data governance program—from setting objectives and defining roles to integrating policies, tools, monitoring, and culture for scalable execution.

Align strategy with business goals and define clear objectives (e.g., data quality, security, compliance, discoverability) to ensure the governance program delivers measurable outcomes.
Assign stakeholder roles and structure ownership by identifying data owners, stewards, executives, and forming a governance council to promote accountability and consistent policy enforcement.
Deploy policies, tools, training, and monitoring through steps like inventory/classification, policy definition, access controls, audits, observability integration, and employee education to embed governance into daily operations.

Data governance isn’t just about compliance—it’s about taking control over your data. For organizations managing fast-growing data ecosystems, governance determines whether data is trusted, usable, and secure across the business.

But too often, governance efforts stall. Siloed ownership, inconsistent policies, and a lack of visibility make it difficult to enforce organization-wide standards or scale. That’s why successful programs combine a clear strategy with tools that surface issues early, clarify responsibilities, and make governance part of day-to-day data operations, not an afterthought.

modern data and analytics governance Image courtesy of Gartner.

To make data governance sustainable and impactful, it must be aligned with business priorities and flexible enough to evolve with organizational needs. Too often, governance programs are implemented in isolation—rigid in design and disconnected from how data is actually used. That disconnect has real consequences: according to Gartner, by 2027, 60% of AI initiatives will fail to deliver expected outcomes due to fragmented governance frameworks.

A modern governance roadmap should emphasize tangible outcomes, continuous improvement, and adaptability. That means:

Establishing a clear and scalable governance structure.
Defining practical policies and standards that reflect real data usage.
Continuously measuring performance and adjusting where needed.
Fostering a culture of ongoing learning and iteration.

This step-by-step guide walks through a practical approach to data governance—from defining ownership and policies to enabling secure access and monitoring enforcement at scale.

Step 1: Define the Objectives of Data Governance

Before launching any tools or technologies, it’s essential to first define the key objectives of the organization’s data governance initiative. This will serve as the foundation for the overall strategy and ensure that all efforts align with the broader goals of the organization.

Key Considerations

Connect to all your data and overcome the challenge of data silos.
Work with trusted data that is high quality and compliant.
Ensure data security, privacy, and compliance.
Enable governed data sharing across teams.
Empower data consumers to easily discover and use the right data.

Step 2: Identify Data Stakeholders and Data Ownership

Next, identify the key stakeholders involved in the management and use of data within the organization. This typically includes data stewards, business users, IT teams, legal and compliance officers, and executives. Defining clear roles and responsibilities for data ownership ensures that accountability is distributed, and data governance policies are consistently enforced.

Step 3: Conduct a Data Inventory and Classification

Data inventory and classification are crucial steps for identifying and managing an organization’s data assets. This involves cataloging all available data assets and sources, understanding where the data resides, and classifying it based on its sensitivity, value, and usage.

Step 4: Define Data Policies and Standards

After understanding an organization’s data landscape, decision makers need to define and implement policies and standards that govern data usage, security, and quality. These may include data access policies, data retention policies, and data security standards. Clear policies ensure that data is used responsibly and in compliance with applicable regulations throughout the organization.

Step 5: Implement Data Security and Privacy Controls

Data security and privacy are at the heart of any data governance initiative. Depending on the type of data being handled, organizations may need to implement encryption, access control, and monitoring measures to protect sensitive data. This includes ensuring compliance with relevant regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA, which govern personal and medical information.

Step 6: Enable Data Access and Collaboration

Data governance shouldn’t hinder the free flow of information within an organization. Instead, it should enable responsible access to data while maintaining security. It’s important to ensure that data can be easily accessed by authorized users and that collaboration between teams is facilitated.

Step 7: Monitor and Enforce Data Governance Policies

Data governance is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and enforcement. Regular audits, reviews, and updates to governance policies are necessary to adapt to new business needs, technological changes, and evolving compliance requirements.

Step 8: Educate and Train Employees

A successful data governance strategy requires buy-in and participation from all levels of the organization. Employees need to understand the importance of data governance, their role in maintaining data quality, and the consequences of non-compliance.

Data Governance and Observability: Cornerstones to a More Robust Data Foundation

Data governance often breaks down where it matters most—in execution. Policies are defined, but not enforced. Ownership is assigned, but not followed through. And without visibility into how data flows and changes, issues go unnoticed until they create real damage.

That’s where enterprise-grade data observability adds power to your governance strategy. It gives teams real-time visibility into data quality, helps reconcile inconsistencies across systems, and makes it easier to monitor policy enforcement at scale. The result: a more automated, trusted, and scalable foundation for delivering AI-ready data across the business.

Tackling Complex Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry

The Data Governance Landscape in Banking

Key Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry

Data Privacy and Protection

Regulatory Compliance

Data Silos and Fragmentation

Data Transparency and Integrity

Operational Efficiency

How the Actian Data Intelligence Platform Tackles Data Governance Challenges in the Banking Industry

1. Ensuring Compliance With Financial Regulations

2. Improving Data Transparency and Integrity

3. Eliminating Data Silos and Improving Data Integration

4. Enhancing Operational Efficiency

The Actian Data Intelligence Platform and the Banking Industry: A Perfect Partnership

About Actian Corporation

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The Role of Data Stewards in Data Governance

What is Data Stewardship?

The Role and Responsibilities of Data Stewards

1. Data Quality Management

2. Data Classification and Categorization

3. Data Governance Compliance

4. Data Access and Usage Monitoring

5. Data Lifecycle Management

6. Collaboration With Data Governance Stakeholders

7. Reporting and Documentation

Actian Data Intelligence Platform Makes Data Stewardship Easier

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From Silos to Self-Service: Data Governance in the AI Era

From Data Silos to Data Products: Why Change is Urgent

Enabling Domain-Driven Governance: Distributed, Not Fragmented

The Rise of Active Metadata and Intelligent Automation

Embedding Governance into Everyday Work

Observability: Enabling Ongoing Trust

Building for the Future: Adaptability is Key

Conclusion: Turning Governance into a Competitive Advantage

About Nick Johnson

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Data Owner vs. Data Steward: What’s the Difference?

What is a Data Owner?

Key responsibilities of a data owner include:

What is a Data Steward?

Key responsibilities of a data steward include:

Data Owner vs. Data Steward: Key Differences

Why Both Roles are Essential in Data Governance

How Actian Supports Data Owners and Data Stewards

1. Centralized Data Governance

2. Data Lineage and Traceability

3. Metadata Management

4. Automated Data Quality Monitoring

5. Collaboration Tools

6. Compliance and Security

Data Owners and Stewards Can Tour the Platform to Experience Its Capabilities

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Why Every Data-Driven Business Needs a Data Intelligence Platform

What is a Data Intelligence Platform?

5 Reasons Data Intelligence Platforms Matter More Than Ever

Real-World Data Intelligence Platform Use Cases

Optimize a Data Intelligence Platform

About Dee Radh

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