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Cloud Pak: Best for automation
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Watson Knowledge Catalog: Best for policy management
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OpenPages Data Privacy Management: Best for GRC
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InfoSphere Optim: Best for Agile development
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Knowledge Accelerators: Best for documentation
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InfoSphere IGC: Best for governance frameworks
IBM data governance tools help IT and data science teams manage their organization’s data. These solutions ensure enterprise data is usable and compliant with business, regulatory, legal and risk requirements across all applications and infrastructure.
IBM data governance helps organizations make decisions by providing insights from data collected across various channels and mediums. It even provides companies with rules on how to use that data to be valuable to their organization.
By implementing tools and strategies that improve data governance, businesses can provide their teams with the best resources to make data-driven decisions and deliver results to business stakeholders.
Jump to:
- Top IBM data governance tools
- IBM data governance framework explained
- Benefits of IBM data governance tools
- IBM data governance tool reviews
- Review methodology
Top IBM data governance software at a glance
IBM’s data governance intelligent solutions link disparate systems, govern the life cycle of data from creation to destruction, manage data from requirements through retirement, enforce security policies and identify risks by building a consistent data management strategy without boundaries between people, processes and technologies.
| Software | Best for | Key features | Free trial | Starting price for paid tiers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud Pak | Automation |
| Yes | Custom quotes |
| Watson Knowledge Catalog | Metadata and policy management |
| Yes | $0.209 per catalog asset per month and $1.25 for capacity unit hours |
| OpenPages Data Privacy Management | Governance, risk and compliance |
| Yes | Starts at $48,000 |
| InfoSphere Optim | Agile development and testing |
| Yes | Custom quotes |
| Knowledge Accelerators | Extensive documentation and customer interactions |
| Yes | Custom quotes |
| InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog | Establishing a governance framework |
| Yes | Custom quotes |
Cloud Pak: Best for automation
IBM Cloud Pak for Data is a cloud-native artificial intelligence platform built with data fabric architecture to predict outcomes faster and allow users to collect, organize and analyze their data, regardless of where it is stored.
The system connects disparate systems, automates important business processes and gives a platform that allows a holistic, unified view of priorities. In addition, by enabling an AI workflow integrated with data governance and privacy, IBM’s Cloud Pak for data delivers an experience based on metadata and active policy management, thereby eliminating the challenge of data access.
Pricing
IBM doesn’t advertise its Cloud Pak product pricing on its website. It encourages interested buyers to book a meeting with an in-house expert to discuss their needs and get a custom quote.
Key features
- Multicloud data access: Offers unified access across multicloud environments.
- Intelligent knowledge catalog: Delivers business-ready data to users by providing intelligent search capabilities, fast performance for large datasets and role-based user authorization.
- Pervasive data privacy and security: Provides data protection and ensures user compliance with regulations, including GDPR and HIPAA. Provides granular control over who can see or interact with the data, ensuring complete confidentiality at all times.
Pros
- IBM offers quality support before and after the sale to assist clients.
- Users find its data preparation capabilities valuable.
- Extensive integration with IBM and third-party services.
Cons
- Users say the product is somewhat expensive for small businesses.
- The interface can be improved.
Watson Knowledge Catalog: Best for policy management
IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog is a cloud-based data catalog that helps organizations access, curate, categorize and share data, knowledge assets and connections from any location. WKC can manage structured, semi-structured and unstructured information to provide insight into the contents of an organization’s data.
Users can make business decisions by leveraging data insights with WKC. It offers intelligent cataloging, automated metadata collection and policy management to guarantee that model information is captured and stored automatically for transparency and repeatability.
Pricing
- Lite plan: Available at no cost.
- Standard plan: Pay-as-you-go catalog pricing. The payment is based on capacity unit hours and catalog assets per month with no cap on monthly CUH or Assets.
- $0.209 per catalog asset per month.
- $1.25 capacity unit hours.
- Enterprise edition: Starts at $18,300 per instance. The Enterprise bundle provides 100,000 catalog assets and 2,500 CUH per month (additional capacity available).
- $0.209 per catalog asset per month.
- $1.25 capacity unit hours.
- $19,100.00 per instance per month.
Key features
- Advanced discovery: Search feature uses intelligent recommendations from IBM Watson and peers.
- Operationalized quality: Lineage and quality ratings monitoring for all data types, including AI models, notebooks and structured and unstructured data.
- Flexible deployment: Ability to deploy on-premises, in the cloud or as a service with IBM Cloud Pak for Data.
- Automated governance: Ensures compliance with relevant industry regulations like GDPR.
- Self-service insights: Delivers instant access to insights about data at scale and generates visualizations and interactive dashboards on the fly.
Pros
- Enhance data quality.
- Offers active policy management, role-based access control and dynamic masking of sensitive data.
- It helps organizations manage data privacy and compliance.
Cons
- Infrequently slow.
- May take some time to learn and use its advanced features.
OpenPages Data Privacy Management: Best for GRC
IBM OpenPages Data Privacy Management is a solution for privacy reporting and risk management to ensure compliance. This solution helps organizations protect sensitive information by providing tools to organize, manage, analyze and report on personal data in a centralized repository.
It provides visibility into the risks associated with processing, storing or transmitting private information. With IBM OpenPages Data Privacy Management’s visibility and control, organizations can implement processes and controls that simplify compliance with regulatory requirements such as GDPR, HIPAA and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
Pricing
- IBM Assessment for Third- Party Risk Management: Starts at $48,000.
- OpenPages SaaS Single Solution: Starts at $75,000.
- OpenPages SaaS Enterprise: Starts at $108,000.
- OpenPages Client-Hosted / Hybrid Single Solution: Starts at $162,000.
- OpenPages Client-Hosted / Hybrid Solution Bundle: Starts at $207,000.
Key features
- Privacy officer dashboard: Provides insights about an organization’s data privacy maturity and risks by identifying assets by jurisdiction and status of privacy assessments.
- Privacy assessment: Conducts an examination of an organization’s process flow and data handling policies through a series of interactive self-assessments.
- Issue management: Addresses issues identified during privacy assessment with remediation steps before they impact operations.
Pros
- Drag-and-drop view and workflow designer.
- Supports up to eight languages.
- Users can deploy OpenPages behind a firewall or on any cloud through IBM Cloud Pak for Data.
Cons
- Some users reported that integration with other tools is somewhat complex.
- Users experience complexity with integration with third-party tools.
InfoSphere Optim: Best for Agile development
IBM InfoSphere Optim is a solution that helps users identify, consolidate and manage the most critical business information assets. It can help companies maximize the value of their information assets by aligning them with business goals and objectives. The solution includes access to all aspects of data life-cycle management, from requirements through retirement.
Pricing
IBM doesn’t advertise its IBM InfoSphere Optim pricing on its website. They encourage interested buyers to book a meeting with an in-house expert to discuss their needs and get a custom quote.
Key features
- Application retirement and consolidation: Users can consolidate data from similar business applications and retire redundant applications to reclaim substantial resources. These resources can be reinvested to support new applications.
- Test data management capabilities: IBM Optim TDM can help IT teams optimize and automate test data management processes. Development and testing teams can use realistic, built-for-purpose, test databases for targeted test scenarios based on company data governance policies.
- Maximize the business value of big data environments: It helps data scientists maximize the business value of data warehouses and big data environments through managing data growth and lowering total cost of ownership.
- Single scalable archiving solution for the enterprise: This capability helps data science teams solve data growth problems, improve efficiency and minimize the risks associated with managing structured data.
Pros
- Excellent data management capability.
- IBM InfoSphere Optim customer service teams offer quality support.
- Easy to archive structured data.
Cons
- Reporting capability can be improved.
- Steep learning curve.
Knowledge Accelerators: Best for documentation
IBM Knowledge Accelerators operates on IBM Cloud Pak for Data to provide services that help organizations align concepts from industry regulations and guidelines with their company data to enhance regulatory compliance.
In addition, this solution ensures extensibility with a glossary and faster time to value by optimizing workflow and scale enterprise data quality, data discovery, metadata enrichment and governance.
Pricing
Quotes for this tool are available on request. Although, IBM Knowledge Accelerators is now included in Watson Knowledge Catalog on the IBM Cloud Pak for Data platform at no extra cost.
Key features
- Accelerates auto-classification and data governance: This helps data scientists identify and label sensitive data, add value to metadata catalogs and reduce risk.
- Business performance indicators: These are groups of key performance indicators around key analytical and reporting areas.
- Availability of importable business scopes: The Knowledge Accelerators business scopes can be imported into a Watson Knowledge Catalog project.
- Business core vocabulary: It includes thousands of industry business terms, including standard definitions. This vocabulary reduces the time that it takes for a business to implement their data governance program.
Pros
- These accelerators can significantly speed up the process of data analysis.
- It can be tailored to specific industries and use cases to provide targeted and industry-specific insights.
Cons
- Requires technical expertise.
- Limited industry coverage.
InfoSphere IGC: Best for governance frameworks
IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog is a web-based interactive solution that allows users to create, manage and distribute an enterprise vocabulary and classification system in a central catalog. It helps users understand the business worth of their assets by allowing them to search, explore and query them. Users can even create asset collections and conduct lineage reports to analyze the data flow between assets.
Pricing
Quotes available upon requests.
Key features
- Data flow visualization across the information landscape: This apability, you can identify data sources, transformations and destinations, enabling better understanding and management of data flow.
- Monitor metrics and governance adoption: The Information Governance Catalog provides a way to monitor and track key metrics, such as data quality and compliance, allowing organizations to measure the success of their governance initiatives.: This enables data stewards to manage and report on governance strategies as they’re implemented across the organization
- Visualize and search data: Users can easily visualize and explore data within the Information Governance Catalog. This includes the ability to view data lineage, relationships, and dependencies, allowing for better understanding and analysis of data.: This enables users to better report and act on data based on specific criteria
Pros
- User-friendly and intuitive.
- Ease of use for admins and for catalog users.
Cons
- Costly for small businesses.
- Complex initial setup.
IBM data governance framework explained
As an organization grows, it’s important to have a plan to protect and manage data. This may involve implementing a data governance framework, which is a set of best practices that helps businesses create an overarching strategy for managing the life cycle of their data.
IBM’s data governance framework includes four types of control:
- Ensure: Controls for guiding work.
- Assure: Controls for doing work.
- Insure: Controls for operating.
- Reassure: Controls for continuity.
These controls allow companies to identify, protect, manage, monitor and report on their data. They do this by working with their business leaders, functional heads and IT teams across the organization to create unified standards for how companies should use information from creation through disposal.
For example:
- Identify will help establish roles and responsibilities for stakeholders within the organization.
- Protect will provide guidelines for how to store all types of data securely.
- Manage can help ensure high-quality information.
- Monitor can give insight into what’s happening with information assets.
- Report covers tools that generate comprehensive reports on all aspects of data management.
The framework helps build an environment where accountability and responsibility are clear across the enterprise.
Benefits of IBM data governance tools
With IBM data governance tools, IT and data science teams can take control of their company’s information and make it more reliable, safe and secure. In addition, they’ll be able to:
- Simplify managing complex enterprise data without compromising performance or increasing costs.
- Reduce risk and maintain compliance with real-time monitoring and continuous validation.
- Ensure application compliance by using automated processes to ensure that applications adhere to established data storage, use and disclosure policies.
- Eliminate security risks by enabling deep visibility into how sensitive information moves through the enterprise.
IBM data governance tool reviews
IBM has been working hard to develop various data governance solutions to help customers take control of their information assets. As a top data governance solution provider, IBM has been reviewed by thousands of actual users across various software review sites.
According to Gartner, 83% of current users are willing to recommend IBM data governance tools. It received an excellent score for Evaluation & Contracting (4.3 out of 5), Integration & Deployment (4.3 out of 5), Service & Support (4.4 out of 5) and Product Capabilities (4.5 out of 5).
Most users find IBM’s data governance solutions useful because it helps them implement strategies that improve enterprise data governance, provide their team with the resources they need to make data-driven decisions and deliver results to their business stakeholders. However, as a feature-rich suite of tools, there is a steep learning curve that requires a significant time investment to maximize the product offerings.
SEE: IBM’s data governance tools may not be the best for your business. Explore these other top data governance solutions to help you find the best solution for your company.
Review methodology
To write this review, we evaluated all the IBM data governance solutions. We gathered primary data about each tool’s features, pricing and benefits from their respective product pages, data sheets and documentation. We further informed our opinion on each tool’s benefits and drawbacks by evaluating user feedback on user friendliness from reputable review sites.