Tony Baer, Principal Analyst, Software – Enterprise Solutions

IBM’s latest Big Data enhancements for its InfoSphere integration and governance product portfolio promote an emerging approach to reconcile Big Data with master data management (MDM). IBM’s official terminology is “building confidence” in Big Data. The innovation is a probabilistic approach based on the idea that when ensuring the validity and sanctity of Big Data, “perfect is the enemy of good.”

This is very much in line with our recommendations on managing Big Data sets where the actual lineage of the data may not be known with the same degree of certainty as internally generated data.

Highlights of IBM’s announcements include new “2-click” provisioning of data, information governance dashboards covering policy compliance status, integration with IBM’s existing data lifecycle management tools, enhanced data-masking capabilities, and a new “Big Match” MDM integration capability allowing ingested data to inherit policies associated …