Alation is a data intelligence platform that helps users find, understand, and trust data. It's used by many industries, including banks, retailers, and government agencies, and is credited with creating the data catalog product category. Alation's platform provides: Search, Governance, Analytics, and Access to tens of millions of data assets.
Alation has four major functional areas:
- Data asset capture – This module allows an organization to create an inventory of data assets and capture information about those assets.? It has connectors to over 50 data sources, automatically indexes assets from those sources, and captures query log information.
- Data catalog and collaboration – This lets users share their knowledge about data assets and see additional captured information.? It includes data health and privacy flags, popularity rankings, a business glossary and allows users to rate, review and hold conversations around assets.
- Data discovery – Users can perform natural language search to find assets using various characteristics captured in the data catalog.? The catalog will also make recommendations to users.
- Data governance & stewardship – This module allows organizations to create, manage and run policies about who can see data, how it is used, and ensure privacy and compliance.? Governance workflows can be initiated, and a stewardship dashboard provides up-to-date information.
- Organizations typically use Alation as a tool for IT, data owners, and officers in charge of data protection and compliance to inventory and track how data is used.? Their primary objectives are to know what data exists, protect it, ensure it is properly governed and stewarded, and promote data literacy.
- Although Alation maintains an inventory of data assets, this inventory’s primary focus is to help these teams automate processes around this data to ensure it is protected and tracked for regulatory compliance.? The primary ROI customers get from Alation is eliminating potential fines from a lack of general regulatory compliance ( GDPR , CCPA , etc.) and industry-specific ones ( HIPAA , AML , etc.) and ensuring data is protected.
- Where Alation is often NOT used is for analytics data management and analyst discovery.? This is because Alation is not integrated into their analyst workflows and forces analysts to jump around between multiple tools and data platforms to work with data.
