# Data Inventory

DevFeed: [Data Inventory](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/data-inventory-15451.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/wise-engineering/data-inventory-4eff3f015553?source=rss----f2565bbe9c46---4>)

Author: Ritesh Modi

Published: 2025-02-19T14:24:14Z

Content type: tutorial

Language: en

Sources: [Wise Engineering - Medium](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/wise-engineering-medium.md>)

Topics: [data-governance](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data-governance.md>), [data-architecture](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data-architecture.md>), [Security & Privacy](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/security-privacy.md>), [Databases](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/databases.md>), [Provisioning](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/provisioning.md>), [Terraform](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/terraform.md>)

Tags: [backend](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/backend.md>), [data](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data.md>), [data-governance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data-governance.md>), [databases](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/databases.md>), [frontend](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/frontend.md>), [governance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/governance.md>), [least-privilege](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/least-privilege.md>), [network-segmentation](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/network-segmentation.md>), [platform](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/platform.md>), [provisioning](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/provisioning.md>), [security](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/security.md>), [security-privacy](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/security-privacy.md>), [terraform](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/terraform.md>)

## AI overview

Wise's Data Governance team describes Data Inventory, a catalog of data assets that records their locations and security or privacy controls. The article explains the system's constraints, design outcomes, and process for discovering operational databases and their metadata.

## Source excerpt

The Data Governance team, part of Data Platform, develops and operates platform products through which autonomous teams can govern their data. The team's vision is to democratise data in a secure and compliant manner. Data Inventory was the team's first product. What is Data Inventory? A data inventory is an extensive catalog of the Wise's data assets. It helps us understand where the data is located and what kind of security / privacy controls are in place. This is also a requirement for ISO 27001:2022. What are the constraints? Any system has to work well with our controls and way-of-working. This led to following constraints: It shall be built in a way that satisfies our security controls such as network segmentation, least privilege access, secure secret management, etc. It shall be easy to integrate with other in-house platforms to provide cohesive experience. It shall be built to connect with heterogeneous and fragmented infrastructure. Many data systems are built through off-the-shelf or managed service offering but others are built & operated in-house. The system shall be integrated by default with technology provided by Data Platform. On another hand, it shall be extensible enough to integrate with data systems not maintained by Data Platform. How did we build our inventory? At high level, we split this into 4 main outcomes: 1. Register assets at correct granularity. 2. Identify the correct owner and make them accountable for the life cycle. 3. Extract the schema of the data asset. 4. Classify the asset with correct sensitivity. This is how design looks at high level: To achieve the above design and outcome, we follow the following steps: Step 0: Discover data systems network metadata Scanners need to be aware of the network metadata before doing scanning. For example: - What is the host or connection string? - What is the technology of the data system? - What is the name of the data system? Let us take an example of how we solve it in our operational datab