Gartner rates 15 data & analytics governance platforms in new Magic Quadrant

Analyst giant Gartner has assessed 15 data and analytics governance platforms in a new Magic Quadrant report.

A data and analytics governance platform helps organizations design and enforce governance policies for data and its derived assets across its lifecycle. By 2027, 60 percent of data governance teams will prioritize governance of unstructured data to deliver generative artificial intelligence (AI) use cases and improve decision quality in organizations, according to Gartner.

Through 2028, 80 percent of S&P 1200 organizations will relaunch a modern, data and analytics governance program, based around a trust model.

What is data and analytics governance?

Data and analytics governance primarily focuses on defining and enforcing policies, in close collaboration with data management teams responsible for policy execution, the report read. Governance use cases span multiple policy categories and apply across a wide range of business scenarios and asset types, including data, KPIs, and analytical models.

The intersection of business scenarios or use cases, governance policy categories, and the assets being governed informs the identification of required technology capabilities. “These capabilities may share similar names across policy categories, but may not mean the same thing, or may be used differently by various governance personas.”

For example, data classification in a data security implementation would be quite different from a data classification effort for creating trust models, which would be based on lineage and curation.

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Features of data and analytics governance

The must-have features for data and analytics governance platforms are:

• Policy-setting: Information policy representation, organization and role models, and workflow management
• Policy enforcement: Business glossary, data lineage and impact analysis, orchestration/automation, user interface (UI) for stewardship, task management, and rule management
• Connectivity/integration

Common features of data and analytics governance include:

• The common features for the market include:
• Data cataloguing
• Data dictionary
• Data classification
• Data profiling and visualization
• Governance model management
• Security
• Data observability

Gartner rates 15 data & analytics governance platforms

Gartner assessed 15 data and analytics governance platforms, categorizing them as leaders, challengers, niche players, and visionaries.

Gartner analysts evaluated providers on the quality and efficacy of the processes, systems, methods, or procedures that enable data and analytics governance platform provider performance to be competitive, efficient, and effective, and to positively impact revenue, retention, and reputation within Gartner’s view of the market.

1. Ab Initio – niche player
2. Alation – leader 
3. Alex Solutions – niche player
4. Ataccama – niche player
5. Atlan – leader
6. BigID – challenger
7. Collibra – leader
8. DataGalaxy – niche player
9. IBM – leader
10. Informatica – leader
11. Microsoft – challenger
12. OvalEdge – niche player
13. Precisely – niche player
14. ServiceNow – visionary
15. Solidatus – niche player

“As enterprises innovate with generative and agentic AI, they need powerful data and analytics governance capabilities,” commented Brett Roscoe, SVP and general manager of data governance and cloud operations at Informatica. “Leveraging advanced AI-powered automation with CLAIRE, our Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) platform empowers enterprises to scale critical governance controls across diverse ecosystems, enabling AI ready assets.”

IBM’s recognition in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reflects the firm’s “continued focus on helping organizations govern data and AI at enterprise scale across hybrid environments, regulated industries, and increasingly diverse data ecosystems,” said Diana Toma, product marketing manager at IBM watsonx.data intelligence. “Through the watsonx portfolio, including watsonx.data intelligence and watsonx.governance, IBM delivers unified governance across structured and unstructured data, data products, and AI models.”