Welcome to the final post in this mini-series, where we have been exploring real-world examples of how customers are using SAS industry solutions and core capabilities of the Viya platform in innovative ways to drive business value.
In this post, I will focus on Data Quality and Data Governance use cases in the context of compliance initiatives for regulations such as GDPR, BCBS239 and IFRS17.
Data Quality Monitoring
SAS Viya delivers comprehensive data governance capabilities through the Information Catalog application, which acts as the one-stop shop for data quality monitoring and governance for all data assets—whether they’re files, tables, reports, models, or code. It facilitates regulatory compliance through the use of automated data discovery agents, which crawl through the data to assess the fitness of data while ensuring governance and confidential information monitoring with a data privacy assessment. A data discovery agent crawls through sample data, generates a quality profile and runs Identification Analysis by leveraging the SAS Quality Knowledge Base (QKB) – an expert system delivered with SAS Viya with a rich set of locale-based rules and regular expressions. You may refer to my post from last year about SAS Information Catalog to learn more about the range of capabilities available through it.
While this interactive approach with Information Catalog works for many customers, increasing number of customers, especially from banking industry, have started implementing the same functionality through SAS code. The objective is to embed data quality assessment through programmatic execution of data discovery agents at different stages of ETL pipeline in order to catch and remediate quality issues as early during the data lifecycle as possible, before they manifest in downstream regulatory reports. This is achieved by making a sequence of REST API calls to the catalog microservice and enables data stewards to compare the results with previous executions as well as against their business-specific rules and thresholds. These programmatic execution results can feed Data Quality Monitoring dashboards on one hand and trigger necessary remedial actions on the other. This automation approach is helping SAS customers deliver on compliance initiatives towards BCBS239 regulation. The same approach can also help detect the presence of any personal data that may otherwise cause issues with GDPR compliance.
Data Lineage
Recently improved impact analysis functionality in the SAS Studio application brings the much awaited column-level lineage support to SAS Viya, which is a significant development, particularly for our customers in heavily regulated industries such as Banking and Insurance. While this helps with compliance initiatives for ETL pipelines developed as Studio Flows, SAS code has remained an area of concern from the lineage perspective. Recent posts (here and here) from my colleague George Beevers refer to the great work he has been doing with our customers in this context and offers a great opportunity for bringing in the much needed governance through lineage as they move their code from SAS9 to SAS Viya.
Final Thoughts
This mini-series has explored how SAS industry solutions—powered by SAS Viya—are transforming operational efficiency, faster time to value, and data governance across sectors like banking, insurance, and public security.
A few key takeaways stand out:
- Innovation at Speed: By leveraging frameworks like Solution Factory, organizations can rapidly deploy and configure SAS solutions, reducing implementation time and empowering domain experts to lead the way.
- Automation for Quality and Compliance: Automated data quality monitoring and governance—whether through interactive tools like Information Catalog or programmatic approaches—help organizations meet regulatory requirements (GDPR, BCBS239, IFRS17) and ensure data fitness throughout the lifecycle.
- Transparency and Trust: Enhanced data lineage and impact analysis capabilities in SAS Viya support compliance and build trust, especially in highly regulated industries.
- Business Value: Ultimately, the combination of deep domain expertise and powerful platform capabilities enables customers to unlock new business value, streamline operations, and innovate with confidence.
As SAS continues to evolve its solutions and collaborate with customers, the journey toward smarter, faster, and more governed data-driven decision-making is only accelerating.
