IN: Native governance that automates the work but still relies on human process
Data governance is no longer a bolt-on exercise. Platforms like Unity Catalog, Snowflake Horizon and AWS Glue Catalog are building governance into the foundation itself. This shift is driven by the realization that external governance layers add friction and rarely deliver reliable end-to-end coverage. The new pattern is native automation. Data quality checks, anomaly alerts and usage monitoring run continuously in the background. They identify what is happening across the environment with speed that humans cannot match.
Yet this automation does not replace human judgment. The tools diagnose issues, but people still decide how severity is defined, which SLAs matter and how escalation paths work. The industry is settling into a balanced model. Tools handle detection. Humans handle meaning and accountability. It is a refreshing rejection of the idea that governance will someday be fully automated. Instead, organizations are taking advantage of native technology while reinforcing the value of human decision-making.
IN: Platform consolidation and the rise of the post-warehouse lakehouse
The era of cobbling together a dozen specialized data tools is ending. Complexity has caught up with the decentralized mindset. Teams have spent years stitching together ingestion systems, pipelines, catalogs, governance layers, warehouse engines and dashboard tools. The result has been fragile stacks that are expensive to maintain and surprisingly hard to govern.
