Bringing Trust to Unity Catalog on the Enterprise Data Activation Journey

Welcome back to “Follow the Databricks road”, Anomalo’s Data + AI Summit 2025 series.

As Fortune 500 companies operationalize data at scale, they face a new challenge: not just managing data, but trusting it. In last week’s series kickoff, we explored how enterprise customers like ADP, Nationwide, and Lebara use Databricks to activate their data for AI and BI teams. The common thread across these stories?

Each organization is on a path we call the Enterprise Data Activation Journey.

This journey captures how modern organizations evolve from ingesting data to confidently putting it to work:

1. Aggregate: Centralize and scale enterprise data in platforms like Databricks
2. Access: Make data discoverable, governed, and trustworthy via Unity Catalog and Anomalo
3. Activate: Empower teams across the business to analyze, model, and act on their data

But while governance tools like Unity Catalog provide essential visibility and control, they don’t solve for data trust. If governed data is incomplete, inaccurate, or stale, organizations can’t move forward with confidence. That’s where Anomalo comes in.

From ingesting data to confidently putting it to work, every organization undergoes this process.

Unity Catalog: The Foundation of Enterprise Data Governance

Since its launch in 2021 and Databricks’ decision to open-source the solution in 2024, Unity Catalog has emerged as a cornerstone of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. 

Unity Catalog brings centralized governance, lineage, and access control to all data and AI assets in Databricks: structured and unstructured, notebooks and models alike. For governance teams needing a centralized way to govern, manage, and secure their organizational data, it’s a powerful foundation that enables cross-functional collaboration, compliance and auditability, and discovery at scale.

Yet governed data doesn’t automatically translate into actionable data. 

Without a way to assess quality in real-time, issues go undetected until they break downstream dashboards, derail ML models, or erode organizational trust. Anomalo extends the value of Unity Catalog by continuously validating the quality of governed data, without requiring manual rule-writing or hardcoded thresholds. Anomalo’s best-in-class native integration brings automated data quality monitoring directly into Unity Catalog. This means: 

• Native support for Unity Catalog object permissions 
• Lineage-aware anomaly detection 
• Automated monitoring across bronze, silver, and gold layers 

Together, Anomalo and Unity Catalog ensure that data is not only governed but also trustworthy. On stage at Data + AI Summit last year, my colleague Taly Kanfi explains how we make this possible across analytics, machine learning, and operational use cases:

Accelerating the Enterprise Data Activation Journey

As enterprises scale their data investments, one thing becomes clear: data quality challenges evolve at every stage of the journey. From initial ingestion to final activation, maintaining trust in enterprise-scale data is an ongoing commitment. Anomalo helps enterprises move faster and smarter by addressing the most critical data quality issues across each stage:

The foundation of Enterprise Data Activation is data quality.

As the only data quality solution backed by Databricks and the 2024 Emerging Partner of the Year, Anomalo is proud to support this evolution by bringing data quality into the governance layer. With Anomalo’s trust signals integrated directly into Unity Catalog, teams can proactively detect and resolve these issues before they impact downstream dashboards, ML models, and business operations. Together, our joint solution gives enterprises the tools to accelerate this journey with governed, high-quality data at every step along the way.

Want to see this in action? Come find us at Data + AI Summit this June in San Francisco. Or, explore how Anomalo works with Unity Catalog. If you’re a Microsoft customer running Azure Databricks, simply follow our docs to integrate your Azure Databricks lusters and Databricks SQL warehouses with Anomalo.