Tool Overview:
Alation

About Alation

Alation is a data intelligence platform that provides data discovery, governance, and compliance capabilities. The platform combines a data catalog with policy management and lineage tracking features to help organizations understand and protect their data assets. Alation serves various sectors including healthcare, technology, financial services, and the public sector, with a reported 40% of Fortune 100 companies using their platform.

What does Alation do?

The platform's core functionality centers on data discovery through its search engine capabilities, allowing users to locate data across multiple sources. Alation integrates this search functionality with governance features that help maintain secure and compliant data access. The platform provides visibility into data lineage at both broad and granular levels, enabling organizations to track how data moves and transforms through their systems.

Alation's Policy Center serves as a central location for creating, managing, and enforcing data policies. The platform implements these policies through features like TrustFlags and TrustCheck, which guide users about policy constraints and usage restrictions within their workflow. These tools surface metadata signals, policy details, and data quality indicators to help users understand the context and potential risks of specific datasets.

The platform employs ALLIE AI to enhance data search and discovery, automating traditional data stewardship tasks. This technology curates and ranks data to present relevant results, aiming to reduce manual intervention in data management processes. The system includes features for masking sensitive data from certain user groups and implementing role-based access controls at the database level.

What makes Alation different?

A key technical aspect of Alation is its integration capabilities, featuring over 100 pre-built connectors for various data platforms. The platform maintains certifications including ISO 27001:2013, ISO 27701:2019, and SOC 2 Type II compliance. These certifications reflect the platform's alignment with established security and privacy standards, particularly relevant for organizations operating in regulated industries.

The platform's approach to data governance emphasizes the transformation of metadata from a passive resource into an active asset. This is accomplished through features like column-level lineage tracking and automated policy enforcement. The system includes capabilities for detecting and addressing data quality issues, including metric functions and health indicators that help organizations maintain data integrity.

Use cases and industries

Alation supports various use cases across different sectors, from ensuring regulatory compliance to enabling self-service analytics. In healthcare, the platform helps organizations balance HIPAA requirements with data accessibility. For financial services, it supports risk management and regulatory reporting needs. Technology sector users employ the platform to manage customer data and drive growth initiatives.

The platform offers database-level policy enforcement and varying degrees of data protection. Organizations can implement different levels of data masking and access controls based on user roles and security requirements. This flexibility allows companies to adapt the platform's security measures to their specific compliance needs and risk tolerance levels.