Automating database governance to streamline data compliance, policy enforcement, & audits (real results)

For proper database governance, you must enforce business-critical and performance-enhancing policies to keep database change deployments safe, secure, reliable, and traceable. Yet handling the change reviews required by internal standards, as well as industry and data compliance regulations, with a manual workflow is putting security, quality, and your ability to remain competitive at risk. 

Keeping databases throughout the application development and data pipelines in compliance while supporting cutting-edge capabilities and ever-more-frequent releases requires a strategic, robust, and consistent approach. It’s not a workload best suited for error-prone manual procedures and valuable human resources like database administrators (DBAs), who have plenty of other things to worry about. 

While some organizations keep database compliance and governance on the shoulders of DBAs, other modern teams invest in solutions that handle and improve database governance while freeing up their DBAs to innovate and expand the organization’s ecosystem of modern data stores, instead. 

From a broad perspective, compliance investments can have over 2.5x ROI over the costs incurred from the consequences of noncompliance. Looking closer at the data pipeline, embracing database governance and compliance automation means deployments move faster, more frequently, and with optimal confidence in safety, security, and policy alignment. 

With Liquibase, the complete database DevOps solution, teams treat database changes as code to accomplish these pipeline-accelerating milestones while capturing rich tracking metadata for complete workflow observability. Real results show how Liquibase:

• Automates policy enforcement for database changes
• Ensures visibility and auditability
• Supports modernization to cloud and hybrid environments
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Database governance for SOX compliance 

As the database management team at an international logistics company set their sights on major innovations to the data pipeline, they ran up against two nearly immovable hurdles:

• Complexities related to adherence to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) 
• Manual database change management (review, test, and deployment)

The team oversaw 11 pipelines and received change requests from more than 20 application development teams, leading to an endless backlog of database schema migrations.  While ServiceNow and Jenkins capabilities helped elsewhere in the pipeline, neither tool was properly integrated at the database layer, leading to further inefficiencies.

Whenever an error occurred, which was a common occurrence, the team struggled to fix it. They lacked any visibility to expedite root cause analysis and remediation.

In only five months, the team integrated Liquibase Pro across all 11 pipelines to eliminate the manual workflow and replace it with a fast and trustworthy automated capability.

Developers can now self-submit change requests for review, testing, and deployment thanks to customized Flows (workflows) and Policy Checks that handle database governance concerns. With every request, Liquibase’s Structured Logging keeps track of each change operation in a machine-readable format that fits your existing dashboards, giving teams visibility and context if they need to audit a deployment.

By automating database governance, deployments, and observability with Liquibase, the organization achieved:

• A 90% reduction in the manual change-review workload
• A 20% reduction in the overall DBA workload
• Complete integration with ServiceNow and Jenkins
• Reliable, consistent, and enduring SOX compliance

These fast, simplified database deployment workflows turned schema change management from a vulnerability into a pipeline protector and accelerator. 

SQL Server policy enforcement & observability 

No matter how large the type(s), scale, complexity, or global distribution of your data pipelines, bringing DevOps to the database with Liquibase throws out the slow, outdated process in favor of reliable automation. In the case of one risk management enterprise that relies on more than 250 SQL Server databases around the world, Liquibase unlocked the robust governance they needed to move and innovate safely and quickly. 

The team’s previous approach to database governance was manual, centralized with the DBA team – and drastically slowing down the pipeline. While there was consensus on the standards of security and integrity, the process and velocity stood in the way of progress today and tomorrow. The team felt they had governance and database compliance “completely locked down” – except that it took way too long. 

It also lacked tracking. They couldn’t easily track or audit change operations, let alone take measurements of pipeline efficiency or reliability. 

“[Before Liquibase] We had a major blind spot on the process, so we spent way too much time reading tickets and intensively tracking down root causes,” explained the team’s DevOps manager. 

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Riding the wave of an org-wide push for DevSecOps, this company’s database team brought Liquibase to the CI/CD pipeline, looping database change governance into an easy, streamlined, self-serve database deployment workflow. That means:

• 60% fewer changes needing review
• 70% less DBA time spent on reviews
• 8x faster deployments
• 4x more frequent deployments

…and critically, a drastically reduced error rate, now comfortably below 10% and dropping. These improvements also give the entire IT team more confidence in modernizing, scaling, and optimizing the entire data pipeline for better developer experiences, customer interactions, and business value. They can do so with infinitely more data and insights thanks to the Structured Log data captured by Liquibase.

Plugged into an observability platform like Grafana, this data can be visualized to highlight areas for improvement or head off governance-related issues before they impact too much of the pipeline. When they want to dig deeper, Change Operation Reports provide the necessary who/what/when to support error resolution or end-to-end audits.

As they scale up and embrace new data store technology, that visibility becomes even more important. 

Supporting cloud modernization with database governance automation

No organization should shift its data to the cloud without confidence in the governance, compliance, and policy enforcement across the current, migration, and post-migration pipelines. Yet confidence needs to be operationalized to achieve speed. It is critical to pull off a cloud modernization program that pulls the organization into the future without dragging its teams – and its data – through the mud. 

When one of the world’s largest and most trusted financial organizations faced the shift from traditional databases to cloud and hybrid environments, it took a harsh yet necessary look at its homegrown database change workflow. With more than 30 fintech applications on the line, the slow, outdated, and manual approach wouldn’t cut it. It was prone to errors and, since it was also siloed from the rest of the CI/CD pipeline, out of sync with the rest of the company’s DevSecOps culture. 

They turned to Liquibase Pro to automate database changes, including robust and customizable Policy Checks and Flows that:

• Protect sensitive data
• Simplify database deployments
• Enforce access controls across teams
• Protect data integrity 

In addition, Liquibase’s Environment Variables helped tweak each workflow to meet the nuances of diverse database types. They also leaned on Automatic and Targeted Rollbacks to minimize the time and impact of any errors on the rare chance they do sneak through. 

Extending DevOps to their database change management workflows allowed the team to automate their robust database governance and compliance needs while: 

• Minimizing error rate (below 10%)
• Reducing changes needing review by 85%
• Eliminating 80% of DBA time spent on reviews
• Accelerating the process for 8x faster/more frequent deployments

Now that they have reliable database governance automation, this team is continuing to expand Liquibase to more pipelines in the cloud. They’re also bringing Liquibase to their most innovative data lake pipelines, where data cleanliness is paramount – and structural database changes happen even more frequently. 

Learn more about automating database governance with Liquibase (and other pipeline-accelerating success stories) in our case study library.

When you’re ready to start your own journey to complete database change automation, governance, and observability, get your on-demand demo of Liquibase.