A recent analysis by Gartner estimates that by “2022, public cloud services will be essential for 90% of the innovation within data and analytics.” As many organizations shift their data governance initiatives to the cloud, they face significant challenges managing those migrations while limiting risk. When navigating the many rules and regulations around personal data, organizations need the flexibility of a hybrid cloud solution to run sensitive workloads on either public cloud, private cloud, or on premises.

To help meet these requirements, IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog has provided customers its full breadth of data cataloging, governance, and quality capabilities as part of IBM Cloud Pak for Data, an open, extensible data and AI platform that runs on any cloud. Together, customers achieve greater flexibility with data modernization and security in a hybrid cloud environment.

Today, we are extending IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog capabilities to  IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service, providing a fully managed end-to-end integrated data governance experience on IBM Cloud®. Customers will have the flexibility and speed to deploy their data governance initiatives with turnkey solutions for audit, compliance, and access control , on a highly available secure platform. Many features and capabilities are available now, with continuous updates throughout the year, including policy management and enforcement, classifications, data preparation, and enterprise business glossary.

Five benefits of Watson Knowledge Catalog for IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service

Fully managed: Customers can experience the breadth of end-to-end data cataloging, governance, and, soon, data quality and automation with a fully managed, integrated, and AI-infused public cloud platform.

Flexible packaging: With persona-based packaging, organizations can begin or continue data governance initiatives based on their size and level of maturity.

Increased speed and agility: Minimize upfront costs and seamlessly plug software-as-a-service into your current architecture to flexibly scale and adapt as your needs evolve, with no installation, hardware or maintenance required.

Proven trust and compliance: In addition to Watson Knowledge Catalog policy management and enforcement capabilities, IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service offers encryption, threat management, private endpoints and configurable access.

Run workloads securely anywhere: Soon, customers will be able to integrate Watson Knowledge Catalog services with the new IBM Cloud Satellite™ Services and run sensitive workloads across any environment, whether it’s a public cloud, their own data center or an edge location.

Upcoming enhancements in 2020 and 2021

IBM will continue to update Watson Knowledge Catalog features, capabilities, and integrations, so customers receive the latest enhancements as soon as they are ready via IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service. Expected capabilities include:

Create custom assets: Create, define, view and update custom asset types within a catalog, like COBOL copybooks or cataloging REST APIs, and gain insights into metadata and their relationships with other data assets.

Import/export with a catalog: Import or export catalog asset metadata and their relationships from a single file.

Reference data management: Centrally manage reference data and standardize common values used across applications with drag and drop features that map columns to reference datasets.

Custom classification: Create special labels to classify assets based on asset sensitivity or confidentiality according to corporate data security guidelines. Create classifications for restricted, private and public data, and create data protection rules to restrict access based on asset classification.

Advanced metadata import and enrichment

• Metadata import: Easily find, import and catalog new structured and unstructured data from a variety of sources.
• Business term suggestions:  Automate data stewardship by using continuously learning, proprietary machine learning algorithms to assign business terms to data assets.
• Data profiling and analysis: Automatically profile, classify, visualize and generate a data quality score for data assets to gain quick insights.

Premium data quality: Gain deeper, customizable data quality insights with automation and data analytics capabilities by measuring the quality of your data with over ten dimensions.

Workflow: Elevate corporate accountability by allowing data stewards to create, update, review and approve assets.

Data lineage: Track your organization’s data lifecycle and determine where it originated and how it is consumed allowing for more trust and transparency across an organization.

Exciting new product integrations to help you maximize the value of your existing investments are also on the horizon. Integrations with the following products are planned: IBM Satellite, Watson Studio, Db2 and Db2 Warehouse, Master Data Management and Knowledge Accelerators.

IBM is laser-focused on improving and streamlining Watson Knowledge Catalog’s user experience and usability. The product is “the data catalog that does it all,” says a senior financial analyst on end-user review site Gartner Peer Insights. “What a great system that allows employees to discover, categorize, and share data among all users. Easily manages data for our large company. No easier platform to manage and manipulate data.”

IBM is excited to drive a roadmap that will continue to build on this momentum to help business deliver value and insights with data and AI models.

Next steps

To learn more about how IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog can help you implement best practices in data governance, read the blog “Three data governance best practices for cloud deployment with IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog” or visit ibm.com/cloud/watson-knowledge-catalog

Get started today with a free trial of IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog for IBM Cloud Pak for Data as a Service. 

Watson Knowledge Catalog expands governance capabilities to include data quality solutions. The end-to-end data catalog was named a Leader by the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Solutions. Read the report.

Related reading: “Making IBM Cloud Pak for Data more accessible – as a service.”