In a world of distributed information fueled by an ever-expanding data cloud, governance matters. Earlier today, Alation Inc. announced new data governance capabilities and a deeper partnership integration with Snowflake Inc. to provide autonomous stewardship at scale.

Alation announced the release and general availability of a new Data Governance App, designed for multicloud applications and powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence to reduce time and manual effort for data operations. The built-in integration for Snowflake will allow mutual customers to manage data policies and protect information assets through a single view.

“We are going to now allow customers to discreetly, elegantly and quickly consume a new application to get data governance regimes off the ground much more rapidly than they’ve ever been able to do,” said Satyen Sangani (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Alation. “We’re going to move into the world of taking policies and applying them to the data on an automated basis using machine learning and AI. Now it doesn’t have to be some massive ‘boil-the-ocean’ three-year regime to get very little value.”

Sangani spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. They discussed the central features of this week’s announcement, an evolution in Alation’s partnership with Snowflake, and the importance of a people-centric approach to data governance. (* Disclosure below.)

Improving time to value

Key features announced for Alation’s Data Governance App include a centralized policy center where policies can be applied and enforced on data at the time of use, an easy-to-configure change management workflow, governance dashboards for tracking progress, and an automated stewardship workbench for curating catalog metadata in bulk.

“This app is really all about time to value, allowing customers to consume what they need when they need it in order to be able to get successful governance initiatives going,” Sangani explained. “The reality is people don’t change their workflows to go off and arbitrarily follow some data governance policy. What you’ve got to do is make sure the policy and the knowledge exists as and where the data exists. That’s why it’s so critical to build governance into the catalog.”

Alation’s integration of the new governance app with Snowflake builds on a partnership that has evolved over the past several years. In 2020, Alation achieved elite status on the Snowflake Partner Network, and Snowflake Ventures became a new investor when the data governance company raised $110 million in a Series D round in July.

Near the end of last year, it became more obvious that Alation was in scores of Snowflake’s largest accounts, according to Sangani. This contributed to the deeper partnership announced today.

“We realized that if you had a huge scale Snowflake engagement, governance was a rate limiter to customers’ ability to grow faster and therefore Snowflake’s ability to grow faster within that account,” Sangani said. “We’re automatically ingesting policies and controls from Snowflake into Alation, giving full transparency into setting, modifying and understanding those policies for anybody.”

A key element of Alation’s new Data Governance App involves what the company calls a “people-centric approach.” Instead of vesting governance with a singular data steward, Alation believes that if data owners retain power over their data, they are more likely to apply rules appropriately and successfully.

“This idea of being people-centric is about how you engage the analysts, the product managers, the sales operation managers to document those sales datasets and those product datasets,” Sangani said. “You can involve people in how things are run, and if you do that you are going to get a lot more success in how you apply rules and procedures. We want to make sure that the people who are using the data and leveraging the data are also the people who are stewarding the data.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Alation Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Alation nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE