As it is rightly said, data is the lifeblood of any organization in the digital landscape. Businesses depend heavily on data to make data-driven informed decisions. Have you ever wondered how businesses can ensure that data quality is up to mark and meets required standards?
Ensuring the quality and accuracy of data is paramount. How convenient would it be if we could determine the source, pathway, and destination of data, that is having access to the complete history of the data?
This is where the concept of Data Lineage comes in!
Data lineage is a process of tracking the flow of data, offering a holistic and clear view of data flow from source to destination and what data changes had been there in between.
Understanding Data Lineage Better
To understand data lineage better, compare it with a map, which directs the users step by step on what direction to take to reach the destination. Similarly, data lineage is a GPS but for data. It facilitates various stakeholders to make better decisions by having the complete history of data.
Why Does Data Lineage Matter? Let's Witness Why There Is a Need for Data Lineage-
To improve data literacy and observability,
Dependency of Various Stakeholders
In order to perform tasks supremely well, data management and IT professionals must have to understand data patterns and the history of the data, as it serves as a foundation for further activities to carry on. Technical and operational metadata, impact and root-cause analysis along data chains, and impact analysis, all require a clear understanding of data lineage.
Fulfilling Regulatory Compliance Requirement
By offering a comprehensive view of data movement, storage, and transformation, data lineage helps organizations to check who has access to data, and what data changes have been made over time, overall offering a complete record of the data pathway. This proactive approach helps in identifying potential risks associated with data alterations.
Moreover, during compliance auditing and documentation, following data lineage can offer insights to regulators to ensure adherence to regulatory compliances.
To Boost Transparency by Enhancing Data Quality and Integrity
To ensure that data is trustworthy, accurate, and aligned with business objectives, data lineage helps maintain data quality throughout its pipeline by offering a transparent view of the data. By tracking the flow of data, organizations can identify and address data-related quality issues.
To Identify Debugs and Troubleshooting Errors
It’s of utmost importance to identify debugs and errors at an early stage, to ensure that decisions are made of accurate and reliable data. Data lineage can identify inconsistencies, troubleshooting errors, and anomalies in the data, to help developers track changes and go back to the previous version of data if an error occurs after the alteration in the data.
To Better Manage Data-Related Risks
Data lineage simplifies risk management by offering insights regarding how data is transformed across the organization. Understanding the lineage of critical data facilitates organizations to eliminate or better tackle data breaches, misuse, and data loss. Such practice enables the implementation of appropriate security measures to protect confidential data.
Making Data Suitable for Business Intelligence and Analytics
It would not be wrong to say that today every organization wants to know the analytics for obvious reasons, that is to land on smarter decision-making. For this purpose, data lineage is essential for business intelligence and analytics to act upon and ensure that decisions are based on statistics and analytics rather than gut instinct.
Summing Up
From the above need for data lineage, it's evident that having a comprehensive knowledge of data flow is of utmost importance to crack the decision-making game. It serves as a backbone for propelling trust and transparency in your data by understanding the journey of the data. In a nutshell, knowing data through data lineage is the need of the hour to address data-related risks and issues.