PKWARE’s PK Protect augments Collibra cataloging capabilities with enhanced discovery across multiple platforms and accurate reporting on identified risks. Organizations can track actions taken during the risk assessment process and plan for enterprise-wide Discovery coverage.
With PK Protect, PII gets accurately denoted within Collibra’s Data Governance Center reports, allowing governance teams to see specifically targeted PII exposure right within data catalogs and determine acceptable exposure. With PK Protect, users can also easily build custom policies to allow business units to determine the appropriate action in a timely manner.
Why a Data Catalog Needs Scan Results
Cataloging is the core of data governance. It collects metadata about an organization’s repositories so data can be managed, inventoried and searched against business need.
What a catalog does not know by itself is which of that data is sensitive. Ingesting personal data scan results into the catalog is what lets a security team assess the risk actually held and decide where access control has to be enforced.
What Each Side Contributes
Collibra’s Data Governance Center provides the catalog, the lineage and the workflow layer, so users can craft custom workflows for performing tasks and adjusting policy, and classify numerous source repositories.
PK Protect provides the scanning. More than 200 supported connectors reach structured and unstructured data, data lakes, data warehouses, cloud and on-premises systems at petabyte scale, and it returns API-consumable metadata covering more than 150 ready-made sensitive types, with a straightforward path to defining custom identifiers.
What the Combination Produces
Personal data metadata is imported into Collibra’s reports, so governance teams see accurately denoted findings inside the tool they already work in rather than in a separate console.
That has two practical effects. Risk can be assessed across the enterprise from one place, and the actions taken during a risk assessment can be tracked, which is what makes enterprise-wide cataloging plannable rather than aspirational.
How the Integration Works
Four steps, and none of them require manual export. Authenticated access is established, repositories are mapped, scanning runs automatically, and the results are reviewed in Collibra.
Mechanically, findings are exported from PK Protect, transformed into a JSON payload and posted to Collibra’s reporting schema, where personal data results become available for analysis alongside everything else the catalog holds.
Why Governance Teams Care About This
Ready-made GDPR, PCI and PHI policies mean the first scan produces regulator-relevant findings rather than a generic inventory, and custom sensitive types can be added quickly where an organization has its own identifiers.
The wider context is investment. The document cites a data governance market expected to exceed $5 billion by 2025, growing at more than 22 percent annually, which is why the integration point between cataloging and sensitive data discovery matters more each year.
Why Catalog and Scanner Should Not Be the Same Tool
A catalog is built to describe an estate and to support the people who work with it. A scanner is built to read content at volume and decide what it contains. The two solve different problems and are rarely best in class in the same product.
Integrating them keeps each doing what it does well, and it puts the sensitive data findings in front of the governance team in the place they already look. A separate security console produces the same findings and reaches a smaller audience.