success story

Virtusa implements a unified data cataloging platform for a global pharmaceutical company

Accelerating data management with an integrated view of data across the enterprise

A multinational pharmaceutical and biotech company experienced a surge in volume and variety of data assets. To maintain governance and regulatory commitments, the client needed to evaluate the relevant technology to identify and catalog core data assets across the enterprise. Virtusa identified and championed the importance of cataloging data holistically across the client’s organization.

We unified the client’s cataloging platform across the enterprise to meet regulatory commitments and accelerate its journey towards digitization. Our intervention helped the client realize better analytics, improve data quality, and provide faster access to required data.

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The Challenge

As the client’s data was not cataloged at the attribute level, small internal teams operated solely with the data catalog tool creating silos. Moreover, the existing processes were too complex to determine and identify the data by the data owners, thus, leading to various privacy and security control issues.

The client could not create a single view of all data related to specific business terms. Hence, disparate data was scattered across multiple applications. Also, the number of data sources was unknown. So, finding the single, true source of the data assets and owners was near impossible. The client’s applications and content were primarily novel to data owners. As a result, neither an asset nor its attributes had any formal control or governance.

The Solution

Virtusa worked in close collaboration with the client as a part of its enterprise data center for excellence team. We developed an innovative and unique solution for the data catalog to allow findable, controlled and governed data attributes by applying relevant controls on data assets at the data attribute level.

We merged the strength points of technical and business cataloging products from leading vendors in the market to ensure the client worked within a single cataloging platform to guarantee one version of the truth. The solution provides a data catalog of a new IT system in a range of 30+ technologies following well-defined reusability steps.

Our solution delivered the main areas of the data catalog by determining business ownership and compliance. We followed minimum data governance requirements for critical applications/repositories by assigning a business owner to enable essential governance for secured, protected, and resilient data.

We ensured the catalog tool’s connectivity bridges with different applications from the capture to consume layers. We also enabled ingestion of technical and business metadata assets, carried MuleAPI integrator design and testing between technical data cataloging and business cataloging, and facilitated data governance structure definition and implementation. Our team also carried out data profiling and classification to support data governance by actively controlling personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive personal information (SPI) data fields with data owners.

Unified data cataloging platform features
The Benefit

Virtusa cataloged nearly 400,000 assets of the client just within 4-6 months across business units. Some of the significant benefits realized by the client are:

 

  • Enabled a single view to browse a standard business glossary
  • Reduced analyst’s time and effort to find and prepare data
  • Enabled innovation of datasets by allowing data combination and reuse
  • Implemented level-3 data classification over 40 critical data assets 
  • Provided customized and reusable workflow design and implementation
  • Offered customized dashboards and landing pages 
  • Allowed customers to rank and rate dataset quality with social curation
  • Exposed data journey (from data source to reporting) with data lineage
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