The data governance industry is almost as confusing as the United States healthcare system. It’s made up of too many tools with too many overlapping capabilities, like data catalogs and data security platforms, which we’ll discuss here.
Organizations need to keep data secure to comply with data privacy regulations and mitigate risks. But data also needs to be accessible for business users to find and share as necessary. Data-driven businesses are weighing up their options for delivering data security and usability, and many of them aren’t sure whether to adopt a data catalog or a data security platform (DSP) or possibly use both together.
In this article, we’ll explore the differing capabilities of data catalogs and data security platforms, explain how they complement each other to contribute to your organization’s data governance and the benefits of integrating both into your data environment.
What are the differences between a data catalog and a data security platform?
Data catalogs and data security platforms are both used for data governance, but there are significant differences.
What is a data catalog?
A data catalog serves as the index to all your business data. It’s a repository for metadata and search and management tools that organize your data, no matter where that data resides. This helps analysts and other business users find the data they need quickly and easily, and prevents data from slipping between the cracks in an overlooked repository.
For example, Atlan describes its data catalog as “Google for your data.” The platform includes a user-friendly search interface, assisted data governance, automated metadata for context and findability, a data products marketplace for visualizations and reports, and tools that connect data to its source to increase trust.
The tools you’ll typically find in a data catalog include:
- Data inventory
- Data landscape mapping
- Data governance policies
- Data discovery tools
What is a data security platform?
A data security platform (DSP) allows organizations to control their sensitive data. It does this by providing visibility about data access and sensitive data locations and delivering the ability to set and enforce security policies from a single location. It allows data teams to manage access to data more efficiently while protecting sensitive information and enabling regulatory compliance. Security teams use a DSP to enforce security and access policies without creating roadblocks to data access.
A data security platform (like our Satori DSP) ensures that data teams know where all their sensitive data is located and provides granular control over access permissions. It serves as a master control system for all the organization’s data and automates security requirements like approvals, data masking, and temporary credentials.
Data security platform capabilities include:
- Sensitive data discovery, classification, and tagging
- Automated access management, including RBAC and ABAC
- Detailed audit logs that cover all data access
- Universal implementation for security and privacy policies
- Automated data masking
- A single point of enforcement for AI, analytics and data access
Both data catalogs and data security platforms offer valuable functionalities for data governance and management. Now, let’s discuss the differences between the two platforms.
Data Catalogs vs. Data Security Platforms
Data catalogs are typically used as a tool by data governance teams reporting to the CDO. Organizations generally adopt a data catalog when they need visibility into the data available to their organization, the process required to access it, the data stewards for different datasets, and the business policies and processes that data users must adhere to.
However, data catalogs usually can’t effectively enforce policies on the organization’s data in a fine-grained manner. Although you can define business policies in the data catalog, they still need to be implemented manually or by using a data security platform.
On the other hand, though data security platforms provide a data inventory with technical metadata, they often lack the full functionality of a data catalog, such as data lineage.
When do you need a data catalog or a data security platform?
Most organizations handling sensitive data with multiple use cases and compliance requirements will quickly encounter the pain of managing security policies and fine-grained access control across all their data. This is when it makes sense for teams to adopt a data security platform to automate access control and policy management. When an organization shares data across multiple data stores, locations, and owners, it will benefit from a centralized repository, i.e., a data catalog.
When Do You Need Both?
When you combine a data security platform with a data catalog, you get total oversight and control over enterprise data. The DSP enforces security policies for the data catalog with clear visibility into who uses the data and how they do so. This lowers data access risks, such as sensitive data exposure, and frees up data engineers’ time so they can deliver core value.
A data catalog surfaces and collects new data, and the DSP improves automated sensitive data classification and tagging. This is particularly important for sensitive data that is introduced over time or in semi-structured formats.
A DSP saves time that would otherwise be wasted on high-maintenance policies and controls by serving as a centralized location for all your data security needs. Keeping data security in one place also reduces the risk of gaps between multiple solutions.
The data security platform also delivers coordinated compliance with data governance and security regulations, layering protections according to data context and classification. This helps lower security and compliance risks while accelerating data use.
To conclude, data security platforms can enforce policies based on the definitions in the data catalogs, and can provide continuous tagging of sensitive data to the data catalog.
How can a data security platform enhance the effectiveness of a data catalog?
A data security platform helps remove friction for data teams, delivering faster access to data while upholding the organization’s security posture. DSPs dynamically enforce security policies for just-in-time data access. Temporary access requests are managed automatically to prevent delays and then revoked as soon as access is no longer needed. By dynamically applying data masking and anonymization, DSPs ensure that data is always available in a way that adheres to compliance privacy requirements.
Adding a DSP alongside your data catalog also improves security and governance. If you only have a data catalog, sensitive data might be overlooked. This could result in overly broad access to sensitive data or excessive manual work for data engineering teams.
Conclusion
In this article, we explained the data governance functionalities of data catalogs versus those of data security platforms. We hope this made things a bit clearer. To find out more about Satori’s Data Security Platform, book a demo with one of our experts or learn more here.
