How Alation Drives Data Success: Key Features and Benefits Explained

Organizations today struggle with managing growing data volumes while ensuring accuracy, accessibility, and security, as well as integrating fragmented data across multiple platforms.

Around 93% of organizations have multiple copies of the same data due to poor data management practices, resulting in data inefficiency. 

These challenges often lead to poor decision-making and compliance risks. Alation provides powerful solutions to these problems, enabling organizations to streamline data management, enhance collaboration, and ensure data governance.

What Is Alation?

Alation is a data catalog platform that enables organizations to discover, understand, and effectively manage their data assets.

It captures technical details and business context for each asset. This ensures data quality and compliance across the organization. It also helps stakeholders gain visibility into their data, its structure, usage, and ownership, fostering better collaboration and accountability across teams.

Beyond data discovery, Alation enhances collaboration by allowing teams to annotate and share insights, making it easier to align on data definitions and usage. It is a data management tool that supports data privacy and data integrity by tracking data lineage and ensuring that sensitive information is handled according to security and regulatory requirements.

Alation blends machine learning (ML) with human insights to effectively address the most complex challenges in data and metadata management.

Key Features of Alation

Alation acts as a smart guide for your company's data. It helps your team easily find the right information to use. Businesses that use Alation report faster decision-making and improved data usage.

Let’s look at some of the key features that Alation offers:

1. Data catalog

A data catalog is akin to a centralized library where all of an organization's data is stored and organized. Alation creates a comprehensive catalog that allows users to easily find and access the data they need.

This helps users locate and understand data across databases, data lakes, and other storage systems. It also provides metadata (information about data) to make data searchable and understandable.

2. Data lineage

Alation visually maps how data flows through systems, how it is transformed, and who is using it, providing a clear and transparent view of data lineage. This helps users understand the context and quality of data by showing its history.

3. Data integration with BI tools

Alation integrates with popular business intelligence (BI) tools such as Tableau, Power BI, and Looker. It enables users to discover and analyze data without having to switch between platforms.

For instance, a Tableau user can search for and pull data directly from Alation without leaving the Tableau interface.

4. Effortless metadata management

Alation ensures that all your data assets are consistently classified, tagged, and easily searchable by automatically capturing and maintaining detailed metadata.

Alation automatically extracts and organizes metadata as data enters the system, streamlining workflows and reducing manual effort. ML algorithms automatically classify and tag datasets based on their content, streamlining data discovery and enhancing both speed and accuracy.

5. Data stewardship

Data stewardship is the practice of managing and overseeing data to ensure its accuracy, accessibility, and compliance throughout the data lifecycle.

Alation helps assign stewardship roles to individuals or teams to monitor and maintain data quality. With the stewardship dashboard, you can maintain an up-to-date track of data, ensuring consistency and alignment across teams.

Benefits of Using Alation for Data Management

Managing data can be a complex and time-consuming task, especially as organizations generate vast amount of data every day. Alation helps simplify this process.

Here are the key benefits of using Alation for data management:

1. Improved data governance

Data governance ensures that data is used properly, securely, and in line with company policies and regulations.

Alation helps in tracking who can access data and how it’s used, making sure sensitive information is accessible to the right people. It automatically monitors and enforces security rules, helping you comply with laws such as GDPR or HIPAA.

2. Greater data accuracy

Data accuracy ensures that information is reliable, consistent, and up-to-date, enabling sound decision-making and minimizing errors. Accurate data gives you the confidence that your business decisions are based on reliable and trustworthy information.

Alation helps organizations monitor and improve data quality by identifying errors, inconsistencies, or outdated information.

3. Enhanced collaboration among data teams

Alation creates a single, unified platform where data engineers, analysts, data scientists, and business users can collaborate.

Alation allows users to document and share insights through features such as annotations, comments, and tagging, making it easier for other team members to access knowledge about data sources. This encourages collective learning and more informed decision-making.

4. Faster data discovery

Alation’s intuitive search functionality enables users to quickly locate data assets, datasets, reports, and dashboards across the organization.

Alation empowers business users to discover, understand, and access data without requiring technical expertise. This leads to faster and more agile data exploration, as users can quickly access the data for analysis and reports.

Role of Alation in Supporting Data-driven Culture

Alation supports data-driven culture by enabling seamless data sharing and collaboration across organizations. Its features such as data training modules and personalized recommendations enable employees to enhance their data skills over time.

By making data more accessible, understandable, and actionable, Alation allows organizations to foster a culture where data is not just for data scientists but important for all employees to drive business success.

Use Cases of Alation Across Industries

Alation's versatility makes it a valuable asset across various industries. Here are some companies that make the best use of it:

1. Sainsbury’s

Sainsbury’s uses Alation to streamline its data governance and enhance metadata management across the organization. By leveraging Alation’s data catalog, Sainsbury’s centralizes metadata from multiple data sources, making it easier for teams to discover, understand, and trust their data. 

Alation’s intuitive search functionality and automated metadata collection help improve data accessibility and consistency, while its robust governance features ensure compliance and data integrity.

2. PepsiCo 

PepsiCo, a multinational food and beverage corporation, has implemented Alation to enhance its data governance and self-service analytics capabilities.

Alation's data catalog and collaboration features have empowered PepsiCo's employees to discover, understand, and use data more effectively, leading to improved operational efficiency and better-informed strategic decisions.

3. Pfizer

Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, leverages data science to do everything from improving application development to finding insights into rare diseases.

Pfizer relies on Alation to manage its complex data, which includes clinical trial data, regulatory information, and product data.

Implementing Alation: Key Considerations

Effective platform adoption requires meticulous planning and coordination across teams to ensure it delivers value aligned with the organization’s data goals.

• Incorporate the Alation data catalog into the organization’s existing workflows, ensuring it enhances current processes without the need to create entirely new procedures.
• Secure the commitment of senior leaders to ensure that Alation is recognized as a strategic initiative and allocated the necessary resources for successful implementation.
• Connect Alation to various data sources across your organization (databases, cloud platforms, data lakes, and BI tools) to create a comprehensive data catalog. This can involve the establishment of automatic metadata harvesting, data lineage tracking, and ensuring that Alation is synchronized with your data pipelines.
• Ensure that all stakeholders are properly trained for maximizing the effectiveness of Alation. Develop a range of training materials, including online tutorials, documentation, and workshops.

Best Practices for Getting the Most Out of Alation

Adopting best practices for data management, collaboration, and governance is crucial to fully leverage Alation and ensure it delivers maximum value to your organization.

Below are some best practices for leveraging Alation effectively:

• Metadata is the foundation of the Alation data catalog; therefore, keeping metadata up to date is critical for ensuring data discoverability, accuracy, and usability.
  Set up automated processes to continuously harvest metadata from your data sources. Establish a process to flag incomplete or incorrect metadata, which helps maintain a high standard of information in the catalog.
• Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to grant different levels of access to various user groups. For example, analysts can have read-only access, while data stewards and engineers can edit or add metadata and manage the catalog.
• Designate individuals or teams as data stewards to take responsibility for maintaining data quality and governance across the organization. Data engineers, analysts, and business users should all be involved in governance activities.
• Define clear data access policies and use Alation’s built-in tools to ensure that sensitive data is only accessible to the right users. For example, set up permissions and roles to restrict access to personally identifiable information (PII) or financial data.

Challenges in Using Alation and How to Overcome Them

Adopting Alation can transform how your organization manages and utilizes data, but it comes with its own set of challenges that need careful planning and execution.

By addressing the challenges strategically, you can maximize the benefits of Alation in transforming your organization into a data-driven enterprise.

Here are some common challenges of adopting Alation, along with strategies for overcoming them:

1. Integration complexities

Challenge

• Organizations often spread their data across various platforms, including cloud data warehouses (e.g., Snowflake and Redshift), on-premises databases, and third-party applications, making it difficult to integrate Alation seamlessly with all systems.
• Integrating Alation with legacy data systems or older tools that do not have native connectors or APIs can add complexity.

Solution

• Start with a phased integration approach instead of integrating all data sources at once. Begin by integrating with your most critical or frequently used data sources, such as your cloud data warehouse or important business systems. Progressively add other data sources once these integrations are stable.
• Alation offers pre-built connectors and integrations with popular platforms such as Snowflake, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift. Make use of these connectors to streamline integration. For legacy systems, consider using APIs or custom scripts to integrate data sources into Alation.

2. User adoption and engagement

Challenge

• Users may be hesitant to adopt a new platform if they are accustomed to accessing data in other ways. 
• Alation offers a wide range of features. Users who are unfamiliar with the tool may feel overwhelmed by the learning curve.

Solution

• Provide continuous, role-based training that focuses on how users can directly benefit from Alation. Training can cover basics such as searching for data, understanding metadata, and collaborating with team members, as well as more advanced features for data stewards and analysts.
  Interactive workshops can also help users feel more comfortable using the platform.

3. Aligning Alation with existing data infrastructure

Challenge

• Data is often stored in disparate systems across departments or teams, lacking a unified view, which makes it challenging for Alation to create a comprehensive catalog.

Solution

• Map out the flow of data across your organization to identify all relevant data sources and systems. This ensures that Alation is integrated with both your legacy systems and cloud platforms in a way that provides comprehensive coverage.

Alation vs. Other Data Cataloging Tools

Alation provides governance tools that have been adopted by over 40% of Global Fortune 100 companies, demonstrating its strong presence in industries where data governance and compliance are critical.

Alation vs. Collibra

Alation sets itself apart with its intuitive, user-friendly interface designed for both technical and non-technical users. It emphasizes data discovery, allowing users to quickly search, find, and understand the data they need without a steep learning curve.

Alation offers collaborative data governance utilizing a shared environment along with enhanced data access and data searching capabilities.

On the other hand, Collibra is a more governance-driven platform that’s particularly strong in industries with strict regulatory needs. Collibra is ideal for managing complex governance workflows. However, its user experience can be more complex, especially for non-technical users. 

Alation vs. Informatica

Alation offers powerful metadata management and data discovery capabilities with a focus on usability and collaboration. Its easy-to-use search, data cataloging, and data lineage visualization tools make it highly accessible for business users that have both small and large datasets.

Informatica excels in data integration. However, it lacks collaboration and data discovery features. Informatica is designed for large-scale enterprise environments, where complex data integrations and governance requirements are the norm, making it a little challenging for smaller organizations.

Alation vs. Atlan

Atlan focuses more on data pipelines and workflow management, while Alation lays a stronger emphasis on data governance, offering robust metadata management and data lineage capabilities to track data quality, usage, and compliance. 

Alation’s governance tools allow organizations to ensure proper data stewardship and alignment with compliance requirements. Atlan, although it offers some governance features, is more geared toward self-service data access and workflow agility rather than rigorous governance structures.

Optimizing Data Cataloging with Acceldata

Did you know that 40% of CIOs will prioritize strategic data management and foster a data-centric culture by 2025, ensuring competitive differentiation in the digital era?

Combining Alation with Acceldata offers a powerful solution for organizations seeking to optimize their data cataloging, observability, quality, and governance efforts.

Here's how the combination of these two tools helps:

• By integrating Acceldata’s real-time monitoring with Alation’s rich metadata and cataloging features, organizations can not only detect data anomalies in real time but also quickly identify the source, lineage, and context of the data.
• Organizations can create a comprehensive data governance framework by combining Acceldata’s governance capabilities with Alation’s metadata-driven policies, governing both technical and business aspects of data management.
  This unified approach ensures that data remains secure, compliant, and well-managed across its entire lifecycle.

Contact Acceldata today for expert solutions in data observability, governance, and performance optimization.