Automating Federated Data Governance With Sharer-Driven Data Contracts

Recently several approaches to federated data governance and decentralized data operations have been proposed. Data mesh, one of the most prominent of these approaches, specifically targets how to automate and scale governance at large organizations. Governance tasks, such as ensuring data protection compliance, are notoriously challenging to automate. Because in a data mesh, a data landscape is decomposed into smaller data products, we can make use of their compositional nature. We extend the technique of consumer-driven contracts (CDCs) known from microservices, to enable data sharers to define testable constraints on how data can be reshared (sharer-driven contracts, SDCs). By designing data infrastructure platform features to support SDCs, such sharing constraints (e.g., only with proper declassification, anonymisation, encryption, etc.) can be automatically verified.