Symphony 2025.1: Unlocking Data Intelligence with Advanced Metadata Management for AI and Compliance
Key Takeaways:
Efficiently managing and governing data is critical for IT success. While many solutions focus on basic file attributes, the latest release of Symphony, version 2025.1, sets itself apart with a sophisticated approach to what we call “named metadata” management.
Named metadata refers to custom data tags that can be attached to files beyond standard attributes like size and date. In Windows environments, this includes Alternate Data Streams (ADS) and Extended Attributes (EA). These allow technologists to store additional information with a file without altering its main content. Examples are author names, project codes, security classifications, or even internal IDs.
Here’s the kicker. Symphony can read and leverage this custom metadata to govern files. Imagine automatically moving all files tagged as “archived” to IBM Storage Deep Archive cold storage, or changing ownership based on departmental tags. This level of fine-grained automated control is a game changer for data governance.
Symphony provides enhanced handling of Windows ADS and EA, ensuring metadata is preserved during data movement. This is a clear advantage over solutions that do not preserve extended attributes. This metadata intelligence also enables sophisticated policy automation through rule matching. Teams can control data movement, archive, and even deletion based on enhanced metadata, rather than relying solely on system attributes.
While solutions may encrypt files in place, they often lose metadata during the process. Symphony, however, preserves complete Windows file system metadata during data movement, including security descriptors, creation timestamps, and custom extended attributes. This is critical for specialized applications that rely heavily on file metadata for proper functionality.
Symphony’s metadata catalog supports complex query operations through a JDBC interface. Teams can integrate with business intelligence (BI) platforms like Power BI or Tableau. They can create data governance dashboards that track permission changes, identify high-risk data repositories, and measure compliance metrics over time using Symphony’s database export feature.
This type of integration unlocks visibility into data governance operations. Teams can now answer complex questions. For example, “Which files in our engineering department have been accessed by external contractors in the last 90 days?” or “What percentage of our financial data has encryption metadata tags?” These insights contribute to proactive business functions.
Symphony database export also enables predictive analytics for storage planning and compliance risk management. Analyzing metadata, teams can forecast storage growth, identify potential compliance violations before they occur, and optimize data placement based on access patterns, service level agreements (SLAs), and other requirements.
Symphony’s ability to crawl enterprise file systems and object stores, tag data with comprehensive metadata, and provide categorized datasets for specific artificial intelligence (AI) functions positions IT teams as enablers rather than gatekeepers of AI initiatives.
AI and machine learning (ML) initiatives require not just clean data, but contextualized datasets. Symphony leverages metadata to create this context, turning raw files into AI-ready assets with embedded quality markers, and business context.
Organizations report that metadata-rich datasets reduce model training time by more than 40% because teams spend less time understanding and preparing data. Symphony’s metadata tagging and categorization means that AI teams can focus on algorithm development rather than acting as data archeologists.
The Symphony advantage is that technologists can implement advanced governance capabilities and prepare AI initiatives while working with their existing data infrastructure. There is no need to digitally transform or migrate data to new formats or platforms.
Policy automation extends to complex compliance scenarios. For GDPR right-to-be-forgotten requirements, organizations need to identify and remove all data associated with specific individuals. Symphony can tag files with subject identifiers, consent information, and retention policies, enabling automated compliance operations.
In multi-cloud environments, maintaining metadata consistency ensures that governance policies and compliance controls work regardless of data location. This portability is essential for hybrid cloud strategies and disaster recovery (DR) planning.
Symphony helps technologists achieve a level of data control, automation, and insight not available anywhere else. This transforms IT into a contributor to business growth, and the platform’s ability to preserve, enhance, and leverage metadata creates a competitive advantage. Symphony doesn’t just solve today’s data governance challenges – it creates the foundation for tomorrow’s AI-driven business processes.
The latest version of Symphony is now available to existing Enterprise and Insights edition customers through standard updates. Comprehensive migration services and training programs, and special “prep and production” pricing ensure fast time to value. Get a personalized demo now.