Data governance policies form the backbone of effective data governance. These help you define how to store, manage, access, and use data within an organization. You can establish guiding principles, validation rules, and best practices for monitoring data and policy compliance.
An organization may have data that can be publicly available, secure and confidential, or a combination of both. Atlan can help you ensure that all your data assets are governed by data governance policies and used in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.
The policy center in Atlan helps you build policies to align with your organizational goals for securing and managing data. You can currently choose from six different types of policies:
- Data quality — maintain data accuracy, consistency, and reliability by establishing standards and processes for data validation, cleansing, and quality control.
- Data privacy — govern the collection, processing, and sharing of personal and/or sensitive data to ensure compliance with data protection regulations and safeguarding privacy rights.
- Data security — outline measures and controls to protect data from unauthorized access, breaches, and loss, often including encryption, access controls, and incident response procedures.
- Data lifecycle — define the stages of data from creation and usage to archival and disposal. This ensures data is retained only as long as necessary and compliant with legal and business requirements.
- Data ethics — set guidelines for responsible, ethical, and acceptable data use, and address issues such as bias, fairness, and responsible AI implementation.
- Data definitions and models — standardize data definitions, taxonomies, and models to ensure consistent and accurate understanding and usage of data across the organization.
Enable policy center
The policy center provides a single control plane to link your data governance policies to your assets in Atlan.
To enable the policy center for your Atlan users:
- From the left menu of any screen in Atlan, click Admin.
- Under the Workspace heading, click Labs.
- On the Labs page, under Preview features, configure the following:
- Ensure that the Governance Workflows and Inbox module is enabled.
- Turn on Policy Center to create and enforce governance policies on your assets in Atlan. In the Enable Policy Center dialog, click Enable to confirm.
If you'd like to disable the Policy Center module from your organization's Atlan workspace, follow the steps above to turn it off.
Once enabled, you can also temporarily disable the module and turn it on again as needed. For any policies you may have created, this will not result in any data loss.