Best Practices to Build Reliable Data Lineage in Multi-Cloud Environments

Explore the role of data lineage in ensuring trust, visibility, and governance across cloud environments.

Introduction

Businesses today rely on data for everything — from planning sales campaigns to improving internal processes. However, that data is only helpful if teams can trust it. And trust comes from knowing where the data came from, how it’s been used, and whether it has been changed along the way. That’s what data lineage helps with — it shows the whole journey of your data so everyone is on the same page.

Data lineage provides transparency by tracking how data moves between systems, who touches it, and where it lives, whether in a database, a data lake, or a cloud platform. It also covers how data is created, transformed, or updated, for example, when records are imported into a CRM or duplicate entries are cleaned up. This visibility is key to ensuring your data remains accurate, secure, and reliable.

Things get more complicated when organizations use multiple cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. While this multi-cloud approach gives companies more flexibility and helps with performance and cost control, it also makes data management harder.