Alation Inc., an analytics startup founded in 2012 by Google LLC and Apple Inc. veterans, wants to reduce the risk of unreliable information getting into enterprise analytics projects.

Alation’s plan for achieving this involves a new set of features called TrustCheck that it rolled out today to its flagship data catalog. The platform, which boasts big-name users such as eBay Inc., acts as a hub where analysts can find and query information from different parts of their organization.

Data catalogs are playing a big part in enterprises’ shift to a self-service model for analytics. This approach lets users access the information they need for their projects on-demand without having to go through a middleman, which improves productivity. At the same time, the self-service model is also making it harder to ensure that everyone follows internal data usage procedures.

“Documenting these policies and keeping them up to date is a critical function in any modern enterprise and this is where data governance comes in to play,” said Alation Chief Executive Officer Satyen Sangani. “But in self-service environments, the old data governance frameworks, built for well-structured and well-managed data pipelines, can no longer keep pace.”

The startup said TrustCheck lets enterprises inject “governance guardrails” into users’ workflow to help them avoid compliance violations. If a dataset is found to contain inaccuracies, for example, a company could flag it as deprecated within the Alation interface. Organizations can take similar steps in situations where a data source violates compliance rules due to some other reason or gets replaced with a more up-to-date version.

Alation claims that TrustCheck is also useful for addressing governance issues that aren’t as clear-cut. If a certain data source contains accurate but partial information, the feature can let users know that they should find additional context. 

TrustCheck is capable of providing data feedback within Alation’s native query console, as well as any external analytics applications that a company connects to the platform via its programming interface. The startup offers ready-made integrations for Salesforce and Tableau Software Inc.’s popular data visualization platform.

Image: Alation