Governance
Governance answers three questions about your data: who is responsible for it, how sensitive and important it is, and which rules apply to it.
The three ideas#
- A tag is a label you put on anything (Personal Data, Financial, Certified). A tag can bring policies with it.
- A policy is a rule: GDPR, "Mask personal data", "Retention 7 years". It has a type (regulatory, protection, retention, security, business), optionally a jurisdiction, an owner of the rule, a description, and optionally a minimum classification. A policy can have one or more parents and takes on their requirements.
- Common properties describe an object on its own level: owner (the accountable person or team), steward (day-to-day care), criticality (Low, Medium, High, Critical), lifecycle (Proposed, Active, Deprecated, Retired) and classification (Public, Internal, Confidential, Restricted).
Two directions#
| About | Examples | Direction | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Security: what the data is | The data itself | Classification | Bottom-up. A column owns it; everything above shows the highest of what it holds. |
| Governance: how it is managed | Management of the data | Owner, steward, criticality, lifecycle, policies | Top-down. Set once on a concept, entity, schema or table and everything below takes it. |
That is why an owner on a concept does not make every column Restricted: managing something does not change how sensitive it is.
How a policy reaches an object#
A policy applies to an object when it is attached to it, attached above it on the same level, or brought by a tag the object carries. Attaching a policy also applies all its parents.
| Level | "Above it" means |
|---|---|
| Physical | project → catalog → schema → table or view → column |
| Conceptual | project → concept |
| Logical | project → entity |
| Semantic | project → metric |
Policies and tags also flow down the links between levels: a policy on the concept Customer reaches its entities, the tables that realise them and their columns, shown as inherited from concept Customer. Nothing flows up or sideways.
Owners per level#
Each level has its own owners. A table with nothing set takes its entity's, then its concept's (or domain's), then the project default of its level. A lower object can switch a policy off, always with a warning until you accept it.
Classification rolls up#
A column owns its classification (its own value, its tags, or the minimum of its policies). A table, schema, catalog, entity, concept or metric shows the highest of what it holds. A value set on a container is only a minimum and is never pushed down; a warning appears when a column is below the floor above it.
The Governance tab#
The first button of the level switch opens the Governance tab: a filterable list of policies with their owners, parents and reach, and a graph of what each policy covers. Create, edit and attach policies here. In any object's dialog, the collapsed Security and governance box holds its classification and ownership side by side.
Warnings#
Warnings flag gaps, for example personal data with no masking policy, or a policy switched off. Fix the gap or accept the warning; acceptances are recorded in the governance version stream.
Domains#
Optional named groups of concepts (Sales, Finance) with a shared owner, steward, criticality, lifecycle and policies. They have their own Domains tab next to Governance. A concept can be in at most one domain, and a domain is never a classification source. Domains are also the unit a project splits into files.