Data Governance: Managing Metadata

Data governance is the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity and security of data used in an enterprise. Businesses benefit from data governance because it ensures data is consistent and trustworthy. This is critical as more organizations rely on data to make business decisions, optimize operations, create new products and services, and improve profitability. For the purpose of this blog, we will look specifically at data governance through metadata management.

What is Metadata and Why Does It Matter?

Metadata summarizes basic information about data, such as type of asset, author, date created, usage and file size. It’s crucial to the efficiency of information systems to classify and categorize data and helps IT systems uncover items for which users are searching. Organizations are constantly being inundated with structured and unstructured data, that both need metadata. Structured data is easily organized and discovered through search engine algorithms. Unstructured data is the complete opposite. Email is an example of unstructured data. Most emails aren’t easily categorized because they rarely cover a single subject. Most business interactions are in the format of unstructured data, making sorting and defining the data both time-consuming and expensive. This is where metadata becomes crucial in a big data world.

Organizations use big data to drive their business decisions and the better their metadata is, the quicker they can extract pertinent information and make quick business decisions. It will also help support data consistency across an enterprise, enabling associations between data sets for higher-quality results.

Managing Metadata with Hadoop

Hadoop is a great way to manage an enterprise’s metadata because of its distributed computing prowess, by allows data users to do descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics in real-time. It can establish circular connections between data sources, publishers and consumers. With so many different data streams flowing into and within the Hadoop system, it is equally important to not lose sight of other key factors when transferring data like: security, availability and integrity. We are experts of this type of data transfer. We can not only deliver your data to any application but can do it in less time and at a significantly lower cost, regardless of the platform or location.