Alation Launches End-to-End Business Lineage to Cultivate Data Trust and Enable Data-Informed Decision-Making

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – March 11, 2024 – Alation, Inc. today announced end-to-end business lineage to illuminate the relationships among data assets, stakeholders, and governance frameworks, fostering trust and facilitating the realization of data’s full potential. The new capability extends the value of the Alation Data Intelligence Platform by providing visibility into data’s journey—from origin, through transformations, to ultimate use. This enhances collaboration among technical and business users by streamlining compliance data workflows, enabling efficient error resolution, and empowering data-driven decision-making so organizations can harness the value of their data.

By 2026, more than a quarter of Fortune 500 CDAOs will have become responsible for at least one top-earning product that is based on data and analytics. This requires organizations to understand and effectively use the data they have collected for years. The proliferation of data is immense and must continue to fuel analytical insights and new AI applications. Creating a system to integrate, govern, visualize, and use trusted data efficiently is crucial for organizations to foster innovation in a data-driven economy as new data sources emerge. However, a Gartner report indicates that poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million every year. Data reliability is essential to combat the data deluge and extract value from data, yet organizations continuously fail to deliver trustworthy data.

Alation’s end-to-end business lineage effectively maps the data journey within an organization, from its origin to its destination. This approach enables all users, including those without technical expertise, to fully understand the data through visual representation. The Alation Data Intelligence Platform catalogs metadata from millions of data assets scattered across the organization, and business lineage then serves as the foundation for discovering relationships between data, people, and policies. All users can leverage these relationships to proactively inform the right people to maintain organizational trust in data. This demystifies the complexities of data movements and provides users with business insights on data health, sensitivity, and governance, building trust and ownership. Alation’s business lineage addresses the challenge of data inaccuracies stemming from various manipulations, ensuring data reliability through precise lineage graphs that track data from its source to its final form, safeguarding data integrity, and fostering confidence among users.

“Collecting data is just the start; empowering everyone to truly understand and trust it unlocks its real value,” said Diby Malakar, Vice President of Product Management at Alation. “Alation’s business lineage sheds light on the data’s journey, offering crucial context for impactful decisions. Integrating trusted data into strategic planning empowers companies to make swift, informed choices, reinforcing data governance as a fundamental pillar of business operations. This strengthens data culture, dismantles silos, and ensures data is fully leveraged in a governed way, blending data, people, and policies to foster insightful, collaborative decision-making and unlock data’s full potential.”

Alation’s business lineage cultivates data trust among non-technical users through:

• Improved data governance. With visibility into the movement and usage of sensitive data across the organization, audit times are significantly reduced through automation and facilitate the detection of business process discrepancies. It also enhances data search and discovery productivity, enabling quicker insights through a user-friendly interface that integrates technical data flow mapping with business context.
• Increased transparency. By providing data maps, all users can benefit from a better understanding of the data in a visual context that is meaningful to them. Users can also trace critical KPIs and metrics back to their sources and highlight essential data elements with contextual metadata overlays, such as data health, sensitivity, policies, or a chosen custom field, supporting key governance decisions related to regulatory compliance and curation workflows.
• Reduced costs. By streamlining processes and eliminating duplicate reports, business lineage reduces development and maintenance costs. Impact analysis and Trust Flags expedite error identification and correction, preventing expensive outages and reducing the time needed for root cause analysis. Insights into operational metrics through query log ingestion optimize performance and reduce technical debt and operating costs.

Read the blog, “Unlock Trust and Transparency with Data Lineage,” and learn more about how Alation’s business lineage helps all users speed up discovery to insight and make better business decisions.