CDE Management¶
Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation
Overview¶
Critical Data Element (CDE) management is a data governance practice focused on identifying, registering, and monitoring the data elements that are essential to business-critical use cases. Organizations use CDE management to ensure that the most important data is consistently defined, governed, and monitored, given the higher risk and impact associated with its misuse, loss, or inaccuracy.
Alation CDE Manager is a dedicated solution that supports this practice at scale. It provides a consistent framework for defining, standardizing, and monitoring critical data elements across the organization, with a focus on data that has the highest impact on regulatory compliance, operational processes, and business outcomes.
The CDE Manager connects business, risk, and data teams around a shared definition of what critical means in an organization. It introduces AI-powered, declarative governance agents that translate regulatory and risk requirements into measurable data management standards. These agents help automate tasks that traditionally require manual coordination, such as drafting standards, mapping CDEs across the data ecosystem, and monitoring ongoing compliance.
The system provides a unified, audit-ready view of each CDE, including its definition, associated policies, ownership, and compliance status. By consolidating this information within Alation, CDE Manager serves as both a system of record and a system of action for CDE governance programs.
Note
CDE Manager is an add-on capability that requires additional license entitlement. Contact your Alation Account Manager for information about enabling it in your environment.
Key Concepts¶
Critical Data Element (CDE)¶
A data asset that is essential for regulatory compliance, risk management, operational processes, or key business decisions. CDEs are subject to higher scrutiny, require consistent definitions, and must meet specific quality and governance standards.
CDE Manager¶
The Alation module used to define, maintain, and govern Critical Data Elements (CDEs). It provides workflows, AI assistance, and compliance monitoring metrics to support organizations in managing CDEs at scale.
CDE Standard¶
A measurable set of requirements that governs a CDE. Standards define expectations for metadata completeness, quality thresholds, ownership, or other governance attributes. CDE Manager uses CDE standards to evaluate and report on compliance.
Derived Requirement¶
A derived requirement is a governance rule automatically generated from the content of a source business policy. CDE Manager uses AI to interpret the policy’s intent and extract specific, measurable conditions that must be met for a CDE to comply with the associated standard. Each derived requirement consists of one or more fields, criteria, or attributes that define what must be present, curated, or validated on the corresponding data assets. Derived requirements form the actionable components of a CDE standard and are used during compliance evaluation.
Semantic Mapping¶
The process of identifying related CDE domains and data sources and mapping them to the standards. Semantic mapping allows the CDE Manager to understand where a CDE appears in the data ecosystem and to apply standards consistently.
CDE Compliance Monitoring¶
Automated assessment of whether CDEs meet their defined standards. Compliance monitoring may check metadata completeness, ownership assignments, or other measurable criteria. Results provide an audit-ready view of CDE health.
CDE Registry¶
A single authoritative location within Alation where definitions, metadata, standards, and compliance information for CDEs are stored and maintained.
Risk Assessment¶
The process of evaluating how critical a data element is to the organization by determining the impact or exposure associated with its misuse, breach, or loss. In a CDE governance framework, risk assessment helps classify data elements into levels of criticality so that the appropriate controls, oversight, and governance measures can be applied. Within Alation, risk assessment also appears as a step in creating a CDE, where a risk level is assigned based on the Risk Assessment Framework governance standard and the content describing the data element.
CDE Owner¶
A user who creates the CDE registry entry.
CDE Approver¶
A user designated through the Approval Rules standard who is authorized to review and approve the CDE standard and CDE registry entries drafts. Approvers evaluate the CDE’s content, risk assessment, and assigned standards, and determine whether the CDE can be certified or returned for further revision.
AI Assistance¶
AI assistance is a core component of CDE Manager that cannot be disabled. It’s intended to help organizations scale their governance programs by reducing manual effort and improving efficiency. Throughout the CDE lifecycle, AI assists users by generating certain types of standards, creating new CDEs, mapping CDEs to catalog assets, linking CDEs to applicable standards, and producing descriptive metadata. These capabilities help automate time-consuming and error-prone tasks, enabling teams to maintain consistent governance practices as their data ecosystems grow.
AI-generated content may require refinement. You should always review and validate AI output to ensure it aligns with organizational policies and governance intent.
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