Challenges
Master Data is information about products, customers, store locations, and other common information. It's also the information in code and reference tables that many systems use. Stored in special tables, master data is used in the primary keys of data tables across your systems, and in defining and executing modeling, migration, and cleansing rules. Governing that data is thus a priority.
More specfiically at a micro level, Master Data is data that is often needs validation, cleansing, standardization or enrichment. Because it is key to so many systems and processes, Master Data quality (or lack thereof) can have a ripple effect across all your systems. Many companies should focus their data quality management efforts here.
Because Master Data is proprietary information for most companies, it is also most likely to need data-centric security (data masking). Thus master data security may be even more important if your company centralizes its MDM operations and is concerned about a data breach or needs to comply with one or more data privacy laws.
Solutions
The SortCL program used in the IRI Voracity data management platform or standalone IRI CoSort product can help you scrub and standardize master data elements (field names and attributes) that you have defined in database tables and flat files. Produce reports to identify changes and condition-based anomalies. Transform and reformat the master data itself, and provide new, reusable metadata for your master data in SortCL's simple syntax and repositories.
Also use SortCL to quickly perform basic data quality assurance tasks -- like duplicate and value-based filtering. SortCL's support for custom field-level transformation libraries allows you to exploit third-party data quality tool functions (like Trillium or Melissa Data). Integrate best-of-breed data cleansing functions directly into the above operations.
Because Master Data is often confidential, it may need the field-level protections that both SortCL and the IRI FieldShield (data search and masking tool) offer. At the same time you transform and scrub, for example, have SortCL to encrypt or mask strutured master data at risk. And if you store or need to discover master data in semi-structured or unstructured data sources on-premise or in the cloud, you can use IRI DarkShield to find, extract, and mask it with the same functions.
Bottom line: IRI software can locate, manage, cleanse, define, transform, and secure Master Data. And it will genearte a complete audit trail to help you log and review search and job operations.
