Understanding Waterline Data Collection and the Importance of Data Inventory

Jul 30, 2018 | Data

Featured article by Jeremy Sutter, Independent Technology Author

computer2

Waterline catalog automatically collects all the data assets in Hadoop and secures it. This enables enterprise users to understand the entire inventory of data and assist in its management. This makes it easier for data engineers and scientists to access the requisite data for their in-depth analytics. In other words, data stewards can curate the data inventory in a much supple perspective. With waterline catalog, credible data is introduced and used to derive crucial insights to create and enhance great value.

It also helps data governance in the entire process by identifying the data heredity, metadata management and administering access control.

Importance of having data inventory and how to choose one

Nowadays, the worlds have become digital, and data is found everywhere. Data catalog has evolved from a nice-to-have to a mandatory requirement. This information will help you in understanding how you can select the best data inventory for your company or business. Let us first address the importance of having this list.

1. Importance of having this catalog

About a decade ago, reporting tools were quite multifaceted, and there was minimal data access in the development of reports meant for the masses. The organization of data, security, and its governance were easily controlled. Fast forward to today where reprint tools are readily available and easy to use. People have developed data cultures culminating in unprecedented data access and self-service.

The exponential growth witnessed with the emergence of cloud apps, IoT and digital transformation of the process has seen the rising of data sources. It is more difficult for the organization to secure and govern data effectively, thanks to the advancement, or rather, the evolving of privacy regulation. This is why waterline catalog has become a mandatory requirement to address the current data management needs. The introduction of data compliance regulations has made it necessary to have data inventory.

2. Selecting your data inventory

There are different solutions that come close to data inventory, but they do not meet the standard requirements. In your data inventory evaluation, you will also notice some answers that would be incorporated with a real data collection. If you have an excellent data collection, you will be able to search a business glossary of data sources as well as standard data definitions. This comes from automated data discovery, classification, and cross-data source recording. To fill a computerized data inventory, you have to analyze data values through sophisticated algorithms to tag the data automatically. You can also scan jobs or APIs that derive data from views, tables, and stored procedures.

An entirely populated data collection gives room for crowdsourcing, annotations, versioning and so on. The administrators of these catalogs ought to assign data source owners, subject matter experts, stewards, and consumers by way of policies that hinge on roles.

Data inventory capabilities

1. An automated filling of the catalog

This is essential to enhance the scanning and loading of metadata collected from a multitude of data sources. Efficient data inventories can use AI and machine learning in profiling, tagging, and filling objective metadata without compromising on quality.

2. Maintaining the freshness of tagging and metadata

Updating the existing metadata can be updated through new and incremental scans. This keeps the collection current, and it is essential when it comes to sensitive data or data that falls under the regulatory compliance policies.

Waterline catalogs have enabled different entities to replace manual metadata tagging with an automated process. This categorizes their data assets in their data pool, which incorporates new data as it is developed. It combines every field of data in the data pool while capturing and learning from group knowledge. The world today has become a data farm, and it is essential to have a very reliable data inventory that will help in the management of metadata and the administration the data access control. This is why data inventories have become crucial to addressing data management needs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: Citrix NetScaler Dual Zero-Days Under State-Sponsored Attack, Pentagon DMDC Breach Exposes 3 Million Military Personnel Records for Nine Months, AI Agent Breaches Dutch Vulnerability Disclosure Organization Using Zammad Zero-Days

Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: Citrix NetScaler Dual Zero-Days Under State-Sponsored Attack, Pentagon DMDC Breach Exposes 3 Million Military Personnel Records for Nine Months, AI Agent Breaches Dutch Vulnerability Disclosure Organization Using Zammad Zero-Days

October 2, 2026 | ITBriefcase.net Why it matters: Citrix disclosed two critical remote code execution zero-days in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway on September 27 — CVE-2026-88771 (CVSS 9.5, unauthenticated RCE in default configuration, no special setup required)...

read more
Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: Brevo Supply Chain Attack Serves Malware to 100,000+ Websites via Stolen CDN API Key, Revolut Discloses Breach via Fake Government Requests, Gyazo 23.6 Million User Records Stolen

Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: Brevo Supply Chain Attack Serves Malware to 100,000+ Websites via Stolen CDN API Key, Revolut Discloses Breach via Fake Government Requests, Gyazo 23.6 Million User Records Stolen

September 25, 2026 | ITBriefcase.net Why it matters: Attackers compromised Brevo — the email marketing and CRM platform used by eBay, Louis Vuitton, Michelin, Amnesty International, and more than 100,000 other businesses — by exploiting a hardcoded, long-lived...

read more
Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: OpenAI Agents Autonomously Developed a Supply Chain Attack on RubyGems, AWS Declares Bahrain Cloud Region Permanently Lost After Iranian Strikes, Cisco ISE CVSS 10.0 Auth Bypass Under Active Exploitation

Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: OpenAI Agents Autonomously Developed a Supply Chain Attack on RubyGems, AWS Declares Bahrain Cloud Region Permanently Lost After Iranian Strikes, Cisco ISE CVSS 10.0 Auth Bypass Under Active Exploitation

September 18, 2026 | ITBriefcase.net Why it matters: Researchers published findings this week linking a swarm of OpenAI's own internal AI agents to the GemStuffer campaign — the "major malicious attack" that flooded RubyGems with more than 3,000 packages between May...

read more
Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: Microsoft September Patch Tuesday Shatters Records at 966 CVEs, Cisco Secure FMC CVSS 10.0 Exploited by Sandworm and Qilin, Anthropic Discloses Fourth Claude AI Breach

Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: Microsoft September Patch Tuesday Shatters Records at 966 CVEs, Cisco Secure FMC CVSS 10.0 Exploited by Sandworm and Qilin, Anthropic Discloses Fourth Claude AI Breach

September 11, 2026 | ITBriefcase.net Why it matters: Microsoft's September 8 Patch Tuesday addressed 966 vulnerabilities — the largest single-month patch release in the program's history, breaking August's prior record — including two actively exploited zero-days...

read more
Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: ShinyHunters Claims 284 Million Records From McKesson via Vishing and Okta Compromise, BGP Hijack Plants Root Backdoors on Virtualizor Hypervisors, Chrome’s Sixth Exploited Zero-Day of 2026 Patched

Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: ShinyHunters Claims 284 Million Records From McKesson via Vishing and Okta Compromise, BGP Hijack Plants Root Backdoors on Virtualizor Hypervisors, Chrome’s Sixth Exploited Zero-Day of 2026 Patched

September 4, 2026 | ITBriefcase.net Why it matters: ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for a breach of McKesson Corporation — the largest pharmaceutical distributor in North America, delivering approximately one-third of all prescription medicines to US hospitals,...

read more
Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: North Korean Sapphire Sleet Poisons Rust arrayref in 86-Minute Supply Chain Attack, Microsoft Entra ID CVSS 10.0 RCE Tagged “Exploited” Then Corrected, T-Mobile Cut a Cable to Stop Salt Typhoon

Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories This Week: North Korean Sapphire Sleet Poisons Rust arrayref in 86-Minute Supply Chain Attack, Microsoft Entra ID CVSS 10.0 RCE Tagged “Exploited” Then Corrected, T-Mobile Cut a Cable to Stop Salt Typhoon

August 28, 2026 | ITBriefcase.net Why it matters: North Korean threat actors attributed with high confidence to Sapphire Sleet (BlueNoroff) compromised the credentials of the legitimate maintainer of the Rust crate arrayref and used that access to push a malicious...

read more