Data Governance and Knowledge Graph

More on what it is

Start with governance. In practice it covers four jobs. Classification labels information by how sensitive it is, and the label travels with the file wherever it goes. Data loss prevention, or DLP, spots sensitive information on its way somewhere it should not go and blocks it. Insider risk management watches for risky behavior by people who already have legitimate access. A compliance assessment scores your controls against a named regulation and lists the gaps.

You may already own the tools. For many companies much of this capability sits inside the Microsoft 365 license they already pay for, where it goes by the name Purview, switched off or never configured. A sound engagement reviews what you own before anyone proposes buying more. Be aware that the more advanced features sit behind the top license tier, so licensing can gate the whole plan.

The work runs in phases. It opens with a conversation about your goals and how mature your controls are today. Then comes a starter configuration, then deeper work on one capability at a time. Later phases tie governance into identity, so that access is granted and removed automatically as people change roles. A written data classification policy is one of the things you should be handed at the end.

Now the knowledge graph. It links your information and the relationships between its pieces into one network, so that people and software share a single understanding of what the data means. That shared meaning is often called a semantic layer. It sits on top of the systems you already run, so nothing has to be migrated into a new central store. Documents and files need one extra step before they can join: they are tagged against a standard vocabulary, called a taxonomy.

This matters for AI because a generative AI tool gives unreliable answers when the data behind it has no structure to check against. Grounding its answers in a knowledge graph, a method called Graph RAG, makes them easier to trace and explain. See AI and Automation.

Two cautions. Monitoring your own people has a privacy cost, and a program that ignores it trades one problem for another. And controls configured with no record of what was done and why leave you nothing to show an auditor.

How IT Raven helps

Add Data Governance and Knowledge Graph to your quote list and tell us what is driving the project. The two halves of this category are delivered by different kinds of firms, so a person first works out which half you need, or whether you need both, and then matches you with a provider in our 500+ partner network that does that work.

We will push for the license review first, because finding out that you already own the tooling changes the size of the project. We stay on one thread from the assessment through configuration and the hand-over of your policy and your records.

Governance rarely stands alone. A framework deadline leads to Compliance and vCISO. Licensing questions lead to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Round-the-clock monitoring of the controls leads to Managed Security. We quote them together when they belong together.