Update: Secoda Automations is live! See it in action here.
Eliminate manual data tasks with powerful automations designed to scale your data management processes.
Introduction to Automations
At Secoda, it’s our mission to give everyone the confidence to use data. Finding the right data, when you need it, and understanding said data is no easy task - which is why we focus on building tools to help both technical and non-technical business teams, and solve problems that data teams face every day.
Today, we’re excited to share our newest product: Secoda Automations, which is now available in every Secoda workspace. With Automations, you can build custom workflows to automate repetitive tasks that your data team currently does manually.
Why we made Secoda Automations
We often hear from data teams who are pulled in a lot of different directions, from support to advanced decision-making and strategy. The result of this? You’re juggling a ton of different tasks, are strapped for time, and still need to make sure all your routine work gets done.
Engaging in repetitive tasks becomes tedious, but oftentimes these tasks are crucial for adding context and helping users understand your data.
Secoda Automations was designed to help you get to your answers faster.
- Who owns this data?
- What version is this documentation?
- Is this resource up-to-date?
- Should this asset be deprecated?
- Is all our sensitive information tagged?
Questions like these become a lot easier to answer when your data is up-to-date and organized.
We built Secoda Automations to turn hours into seconds. Take repetitive, routine tasks off your plate, while maintaining and improving the quality of your data.
Secoda Automations lets you build custom workflows to suit your team’s needs. Create workflows to help you automate routine duties, like tagging sensitive information as PII, finding redundant data, assigning ownership to data sources, and much, much more.
With more time on your hands, your team can focus on your most impactful work, and by reducing repetitive actions required by users, work can be more enjoyable too.
How Secoda Automations works
An Automation consists of two parts: triggers and actions.
Triggers initiate the Automation workflow. Set them to activate on specific schedules—hourly, daily, or custom—to start automation runs.
Actions are the main components of Secoda Automations, enabling changes to your metadata. Use actions to filter and update information, select metadata by schema or owner, and modify it by adding tags or assigning it to a Team or Collection in Secoda. Actions can be combined to create customized sequences for your team’s needs.
Future Functionality
We’re excited to release Automations to every workspace, and we’re already thinking about how we can expand this feature in future to be even more useful. In the future, you can look forward to triggers that expand beyond time-based triggers, for example triggers based on metadata updates. In addition, we’ll be adding actions that can trigger notifications in Slack, or connect seamlessly with integrations in Secoda, so you can integrate your Secoda Automations workflows with any tools you use.
We’re prioritizing creating tools that save your team time and increase connectivity across your whole stack. As a fast follow, we’ll be extending the functionality of Secoda AI to automations.
Soon, you will be able to use Secoda AI to receive suggested Automations based on your workspace activity. You’ll be able to create custom workflows that are tailored to how you and your team use Secoda. We will also be introducing AI Actions which will combine our existing generative AI capabilities with automated workflows. For example, a potential workflow would be to generate column descriptions and documentation based on any given rules or logic.
When to use Secoda Automations
Secoda Automations workflows are completely customizable, leaving you with the freedom to design flows that take care of your most repetitive and routine tasks. That said, we do see a number of places where Automations can be extremely helpful to data teams.
Documentation
Keeping documentation up to date and complete involves a lot of manual updates. Create workflows that help you effortlessly maintain documentation, ensuring it's always up-to-date and complete:
- Custom Property Propagation: If a custom property is added to a table, automatically add it to all tables in the same schema.
- Keyword-Based Tagging: When a keyword is detected in a column name or description, apply a specific tag.
- Automated Documentation Versioning: When changes are made to a schema, trigger documentation versioning and tag the updated documents as 'version-updated'.
Migration
Migrating to new tools is always a production - build workflos for a smooth transition of metadata, tags, and documentation to a new tool. Simplify the relocation process, while also preserving essential information, helping with continuity in your data.
- Legacy System Flagging: Detect and tag resources still present in legacy systems that still need migration
- Deprecation Warnings: Automatically tag assets that haven’t been updated or viewed in the last 90 days.
- Schema Change Alerts: Tag tables as “recently changed” when a schema change occurs that may impact migration plans
Data Cleaning
We all know how important good data hygiene is - maintaining a clean and relevant dataset is crucial for everyday activities. Build Automations to easily identify redundant data, delegate cleanup tasks to resource owners, recommend assets for deprecation, and more.
- Automatic Tagging for Cleanup Candidates: Tag data that has not been accessed within a certain period as 'for review' for cleanup.
- Cleanup Task Assignment: Assign cleanup tasks to data owners based on the tags and last accessed date.
- Cleanup Progress Tracking: Track and report the progress of ongoing data cleanup initiatives.
Data Enablement
Maintaining confidence and drive adoption among technical and non-technical business teams is a top priority for data teams. Build workflows to ensure that stakeholdersare using the most up-to-date resources, which can help you foster trust and support data enablement at your organization.
- Popularity: Automatically tag your most used assets in any integration
- Trust Scorecards: Develop and tag data based on scorecards for datasets based on their documentation completeness and usage.
Data Governance
Expand your data governance program by building workflows to ensure your data is secure. Use Secoda Automations to automatically verify high-quality data, tag assets containing PHI, PII and HIPPA information, and automate role-based tagging.
- Verifying data: Verify high-quality data automatically by automatically tagging data that has been documented to 100% completion.
- Governance Policy Distribution: Distribute new or updated governance tags to all assets containing PHI, PII, or HIPPA
- Role-Based Tagging: Apply security classification tags based on user roles and data sensitivity levels.
- Automated Tagging for New Datasets: When new datasets are added, scan and tag them with governance-related tags such as 'confidential', 'internal', etc.
- Automated Data Steward Assignment: Assign a data steward to new datasets based on predefined rules.
Get started with Secoda Automations today
Secoda Automations is available in every single Secoda workspace today - log in and get started with one of the Automations templates.
