Governance Models

In today’s data-driven organizations, governance models are key to managing data access and ensuring security and compliance. Whether you follow a centralized, decentralized, or a hybrid approach, your model shapes who makes decisions about data access, how those decisions are implemented, and how compliance is enforced.

Immuta supports a federated governance approach that balances central oversight with domain-level control, so you can scale governance securely without slowing down your teams.

In this guide, you’ll learn

• The differences between centralized and decentralized governance models

• How Immuta’s federated governance structure supports both control and flexibility

• Steps for organizing and scaling governance across teams and domains

Centralized governance

In a centralized governance model, a single authority—traditionally central IT or a governance team—defines and enforces data policies, standards, and processes across the entire organization. This central team typically makes key decisions about data access, security, quality, and compliance.

While this model offers strong central control, it often introduces bottlenecks, as one team is tasked with managing all data policies across the organization.

Key features of centralized governance

• Central ownership: A dedicated team, often IT, manages all governance policies to maintain organization-wide consistency.

• Strong control: The team brings technical expertise to managing access policies, tagging, and attributes.

• Translation challenges: Without domain-specific knowledge, central teams may struggle to translate business needs into effective policies, causing inefficiencies and delays.

• Potential bottlenecks: With all decisions funneling through a single team, data access or policy changes can be slow. The central authority can become a bottleneck, hindering agility and timely data access​.

Decentralized governance

In a decentralized governance model, decision-making authority and data management responsibilities are distributed across business units, departments, or individual data owners. This model empowers domain experts—those who best understand the data—to take responsibility for policy creation and management, reducing bottlenecks and enhancing agility.

Key features of decentralized governance

• Domain ownership and expertise: Data owners within within each business unit or domain control the access policies for their data, improving policy accuracy and relevance.

• Scalability: This model scales effectively because each domain manages its own policies, reducing the reliance on a central IT team.

• Agility: Decentralized governance allows for faster policy changes, as business units can implement updates directly, without needing to go through a centralized team.

Immuta’s three-layer federated governance model

Immuta’s three-layer federated governance model combines both centralized and decentralized elements, allowing for flexible, scalable governance across domains. This model operates at three levels:

1. Global policies: High-level governance policies, such as PII masking or location-based restrictions, are defined at the global level by a central governance team. These policies are consistent across all domains and set overarching security standards.

2. Domain-level policies: Domain owners are responsible for implementing specific policies that govern the data within their respective business units or functions. This ensures that policies are tailored to the needs of each domain while adhering to global governance standards.

3. Sub-domain policies: At the sub-domain level, individual teams or data product owners can create more granular policies that apply to specific datasets or user groups. This flexibility allows policies to be adapted based on the precise needs of the data and its consumers​.

Organizing for federated governance

	Purpose	Responsibilities	Stakeholders
Cross-domain governance board	Establish and oversee data governance practices that span multiple domains.	Develop and communicate global governance policies, monitor adherence, and facilitate stakeholder enablement and collaboration.	Chief Data Officer (CDO) / Chief Information Officer (CIO), Data Governance Manager, Domain Owners, Compliance Officer(s), Data Privacy Specialist(s), Data Stewardship Lead(s)
Domain governance team	Own data governance within a specific domain or business area.	Define and enforce data ownership roles and policies within the domain, monitor and ensure compliance with policies, and generally oversee domain-specific data quality, ownership, and usage.	Domain Owner, Domain Data Steward, Domain Data Architect, Data Product Owners, Domain Compliance Coordinator
Self-serve data platform team	Build and maintain the technical infrastructure and tools that enable domain teams to manage their data independently and efficiently.	Develop and maintain a user-friendly platform for domain teams to create, manage, and monitor data pipelines. Provide tools, interfaces, and enablement for data discovery, cataloging, and access control.	Platform Architect, Platform Engineer, Platform Operations Specialist, Platform Enablement Trainer

To successfully implement a federated governance model, organizations need to focus on aligning teams and building a community around governance. Key steps include

• Identifying champions: Select internal champions who can lead governance initiatives within their domains and ensure alignment with the central governance framework.

• Aligning stakeholders: Bring together technical, business, security, and compliance teams to ensure that governance processes are both effective and compliant.

• Defining processes: Establish clear frameworks and processes to support governance efforts, ensuring consistency and scalability.

• Standardizing patterns: Create reusable governance patterns (e.g., row redaction, country-based access) that can be applied across domains​.

Conclusion

Immuta’s governance framework supports both centralized and decentralized models, offering flexibility to meet the needs of different organizations. By adopting a three-layer federated governance approach, organizations can empower domain experts, enhance agility, and scale their governance practices while maintaining strong control over data access and security.