Explore Cloud Data Governance and Catalog
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe what you can do with Cloud Data Governance and Catalog.
- Explain how Cloud Data Governance and Catalog helps find and understand data in your organization.
A Question Every Business Runs Into
Navigating the complexities of data discovery, understanding, and governance is a common challenge that leaves business professionals questioning the origin, reliability, and proper use of their organizational data.
For example, Angela Duran, a business analyst at Infiwave, is preparing a report on customer orders. She knows the data is there—somewhere—but she’s not sure which system it came from, whether she can trust it, or whether any policies govern how it can be used. She has the same question that almost every analyst, compliance officer, and data steward faces: How do I find the right data, understand where it came from, and know that it’s governed correctly?
The answer is Informatica Cloud Data Governance and Catalog, or CDGC.
What Is Cloud Data Governance and Catalog?
CDGC is a purpose-built platform that helps organizations understand, analyze, interpret, and govern large volumes of data. It works by combining two powerful capabilities.
- Data Governance: This ensures that an organization’s information assets are formally, properly, proactively, and efficiently managed throughout the enterprise to secure trust and accountability.
- Data Catalog: This provides a comprehensive view of physical and operational metadata about data statistics, data relationships, and data lineage to help teams make critical decisions about their data.
Together, these capabilities give Angela—and every person in the organization—a single place to find data, understand it, and trust it.
What You Can Do with CDGC
CDGC supports a wide range of activities across your organization. Here’s what you can do.
- Find data fast: Use powerful search features to quickly locate data across your organization.
- Understand your data: Review attributes, profiling, and classification information for any asset.
- Trace data movement: Review the lineage of data—including transformations—from start to end points.
- Add business context: Create links between technical assets and business definitions so that everyone shares the same language.
- Build relationships: Connect metadata assets to demonstrate how data relates across systems.
- Assign accountability: Designate users or groups as stakeholders responsible for specific assets.
- Collaborate: Use workflow-driven processes to create, review, and publish assets with your team.
- Govern with policies: Create actionable data access policies and rules to protect sensitive data.
Why Data Governance Matters
Without data governance, answering even simple questions becomes a challenge. Teams must dig through spreadsheets, ask multiple colleagues, yet still arrive at uncertain answers. Common pain points include:
- No clear explanation of data for AI and machine learning models
- Inability to trace data use and transformations
- No common understanding of data across business units
- Limited management of data stored in cloud systems
- A focus on infrastructure and data movement instead of quality, cataloging, and governance
CDGC solves these problems. It organizes metadata, visualizes data flow, documents assets, adds business context, and applies governance—all in one platform.
Who Uses CDGC
CDGC serves multiple roles across an organization.
- Business analysts like Angela use it to find trusted data and understand where it came from.
- Data governance teams use it to apply and monitor policies.
- IT specialists and data architects use it to trace technical lineage and manage catalog sources.
- Compliance officers use it to ensure regulatory requirements are met.
- Reporting teams use it to verify the source and reliability of data used in reports.
In this unit, you learned what CDGC is, why data governance matters, and how CDGC serves different roles across an organization. In the next unit, you explore Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC)—the platform behind CDGC—and get familiar with the key platform terms and concepts.