Alation Data Catalog vs. OneTrust Privacy Automation

Alation is pretty easy to implement. We were able to do it ourselves with Alation's help, no 3rd party needed. We are currently migrating to Snowflake, and it has been helpful with prioritizing what gets migrated. It's great for searching for tables and views. I even use it when I'm trying to find fields in a large table. If I'm not sure if the field is called first_name, firstname, or fname, I can use Alation's table page, filter for fields with "name", and easily find it.

Incentivized

OneTrust offers the monitoring, the assessment, and the verification process of data, a formal way of ensuring the results outlined are correct, understandable, and confined. Besides, the policy and the website scanners from OneTrust are incredible, virtual, and concrete. Besides, OneTrust outlines the risk management options, with the customer mapping and taking the required assessments. Lastly, websites and cookies are efficiently scanned and made efficient for concrete business management.

Incentivized

• Ability to link objects using the @ symbol. It allows us to easily provide a way to get more information or context. So if the business concept is part of a hierarchy, we can link to the other terms in that hierarchy.
• The customization is really helpful. Most object types have robust customization options. Others are less so, but it is improving. We've created multiple custom fields to support our data governance framework.
• The search feature with filtering is helpful in narrowing down what you're looking for.

Incentivized

• Help us process DSR or Data subject Request efficiently
• Goes particularly well with our most useful device which is Iterable.
• User friendly interface

Incentivized

• The lineage UI is not ready for primetime. I would not recommend this feature for my users at this time because it's too complex to understand and is visually difficult to track down specific paths.
• The underlying infrastructure of the on-premise version of the software is fragile and unnecessarily complicated, using too many modules and technologies.
• The license model of the on-premise version contains too many add-ons. I would like to pay one price and get all of the features.

Incentivized

• I had a hard time trying to figure how to save the cookie settings correctly.
• Integrate OneTrust with other systems is not automatic.

Incentivized

Overall, we are happy with the functionality of the platform. While there are are areas that we would like to see further improvement in, the tooling is highly configurable and aligns well with our use case. A mature API layer makes it straightforward to integrate with other data tooling. Alation stands out for its pro-active engagement with their customers, both to resolve issues and in communicating their feature roadmap

Incentivized

Alation Data Catalog is generally easy to use for finding datasets, reviewing documentation, and understanding ownership. The platform makes data discovery more efficient and improves trust in shared assets. I rated it 7 because the navigation can be complex at times, and the search results could be more precise and easier to refine.

We have used a shared hosted tenant managed by OneTrust for over three years with only one instance of a lengthy (4+ hours) unexpected outage which happened years ago.

Incentivized

We selected a European hosting location based on our initial use case, however, our usage of the OneTrust platform has expanded globally to where the majority of users sit in the Americas or Asia-Pacific regions. There is a noticeable lag when navigating the platform for users located far away from the hosting location.

As a user, you can mitigate any sluggish response time by the aggressive use of multiple browser tabs. I commonly have one tab open on an Inventory detail screen, another tab on an Assessment window, and maybe another tab on a customized inventory list screen. If one tab is slow I hop to another tab and work on that tab while the first tab responds.

Incentivized

The account management and technical support teams are both excellent. There is regular account manager engagement, and technical issues are generally resolved very quickly. The vendor engages us in product development through regular updates on the product strategy & feature roadmap.

Incentivized

Both our customer rights access and cookie consent advisors were responsive and helpful in getting us trained on using the platform and the various assets implemented on our website. We had multiple training sessions that were more than enough in getting all of the users on our team familiar with what we needed to do.

Incentivized

An implementation specialist worked with us remotely during our initial deployment. Due to the diverse geographic locations of my organization's participants, the implementation and training had to be done remotely (this was before COVID-driven remote work).

The implementation specialist was knowledgeable and helpful but to really get full benefit from the platform I encourage organizations to dedicate a specialist within your company to really study and learn the platform.

Incentivized

Key insight from implementing Alation is that, as a cloud-based SaaS product, the majority of effort is not infrastructure-related but instead focused on security configuration and integration with existing platforms, including identity management, access controls, and metadata connectivity to core data systems. Because of its data profiling functionality, careful consideration had to be given to data security and data sovereignty.

Incentivized

Alation might not have the same level of technical capabilities and features as these others (though it's very close) but what Alation offers is a neat and easy to learn UI. The new UI is even better, bringing more content onto the same space like Informatica while maintaining the friendly interface of the old UI

Incentivized

OneTrust is designed to focus on privacy management, the other tools are tailored for privacy but not primarily focused on privacy management.

Incentivized

The platform has exceptional capabilities to customize the user interface, reports, and recorded information. In most cases, the customization can be compartmentalized so that if the customization performed for Department A is determined to not impact Department B, the customization can be hidden from Department B.

We have four different departments using the IT Risk Management module. Three departments share their work in what we call the 'shared data risk management zone'. Another department is using IT Risk Management for a bespoke portfolio risk management task, and the customization for this department is largely hidden from the other departments.

Incentivized

• We've had limited but very positive impact for 3 data subject matter experts. In the past they were fielding very similar questions from users stumbling on their data. Now, rather than responding to each email or chat message, they not only direct users to the catalog but they also reach out to me to do a walk-through of Alation's other features.
• Another positive impact is having the data dictionary live in one location. This has been tremendous in making the dictionaries accessible and consistent.

Incentivized

• We are able to quantify the number of business and technical processes assisted by the governance specialists
• The governance specialists that use the platform are more effective and efficient.

Incentivized