You can streamline your data governance requirements in Atlan with governance workflows and manage approvals from the task inbox. Governance workflows enable you to set up robust controls on data access management, metadata enrichment, and more, with out-of-the-box workflow templates and automated execution.
For example, instead of allowing your users to directly query data or update the certification status of an asset, you can curate assets that require advanced controls and create governance workflows to govern them. These workflows will run in the background and only approve users with appropriate permissions to perform any action.
You can use governance workflows to ensure:
- Policy compliance — set up repeatable processes and approval flows for your data assets in Atlan to adhere to regulatory requirements.
- Risk mitigation — determine how data in your organization is used and shared with automated access policies.
- Data security — manage requests for data access and processing to only allow access to authorized individuals or teams.
- Metadata change management — monitor and audit metadata changes to align with organizational standards.
Workflow properties
A common set of properties are applicable to all governance workflows in Atlan:
- Only an admin user can create, update, or delete governance workflows.
- Out-of-the-box workflow templates.
- Predefined steps based on workflow selection.
- Must be associated with an asset type or action.
- Set up auto-approval rules for users, groups, or owners based on metadata attributes and policies.
- Activity logs for all workflows available by default.
- Visibility into the transition states of a workflow.
Workflow templates
You can choose from the following workflow templates to govern your assets and manage access:
Change management
This template allows you to control changes to metadata within your organization's data management and governance framework. Use cases include requests to:
- Add, update, and remove descriptions
- Add, update, and remove certificates
- Add, update, and remove an alias
- Link and remove terms
- Add, update, and remove owners
- Attach, update, and remove tags
- Add, update, and remove READMEs
- Update and archive glossaries, categories, and terms
- Move terms and categories
- Add associated terms
Change management workflows will override any permissions assigned through user roles or access policies. For example, even for users with edit access, metadata update requests will flow through change management workflows.
New entity creation
This template allows you to control the creation and publication of new glossaries, categories, terms, and tags in Atlan. The new entity creation workflow will override existing glossary policies and user role permissions to create new entities.
Whether you are an admin or a member user in Atlan, the existence of a new entity creation workflow means you will need to submit a request for creating new entities. Guest users are neither allowed to directly create nor suggest the creation of glossaries, categories, terms, and tags.
Data access approval
This template allows you to automate the process of requesting and approving access to data assets in Atlan. This includes a combination of a self-service approach as well as mandating human intervention for approval. Use cases include requests to query data or view sample data.
- Access in Atlan — allow requesters to request data access for querying data in Insights and previewing sample data within Atlan only.
- Access everywhere — allow requesters to request data access within Atlan and at source. For the latter, Atlan will create a support ticket for your team to grant data access and display the status of your request in Atlan — coming soon.