3 Ways to Enhance Data Governance with Tableau Cloud Manager

Strong data governance is essential to safe, organization-wide data access and creating a thriving data culture at your company. To give you more governance options with Tableau Cloud, we’ve added a new administration layer to Tableau Cloud called Tableau Cloud Manager.

Tableau Cloud Manager allows admins to easily and efficiently manage users and licenses across multiple Tableau Cloud sites—that’s not a typo! Tableau Cloud Manager gives you access to multiple sites so you can simplify administration and meet governance and data residency requirements as you expand your cloud analytics.

In this post, we’ll dig into three Tableau Cloud Manager use cases that can enhance your deployment’s governance today. 

1. Set up development, testing, and production sites

Establishing discrete sites for development, testing, and production is a great method for increasing your governance posture. Tableau Cloud Manager makes this easy by enabling the creation of distinct sites for each stage while also allowing you to manage users across multiple sites.

On the development site, analysts have the freedom to experiment and innovate without affecting the stability of business-critical dashboards and metrics.

Next, content can be promoted to the testing site to undergo whatever testing your organization requires. On this site, you might want a mix of developers, analytics, and business users to allow for iterative improvements to dashboards based on end-user testing and feedback. With Tableau Cloud Manager, you can provide users access to multiple sites without duplicative licensing costs and control what users can and cannot do on those sites. By maintaining tight control over user access, you can significantly enhance your data governance practices and mitigate the risks associated with unauthorized access.

Finally, once content is tested and meets your organization’s standards, it can be promoted to the production site where it can be used to inform better decisions across your business. To make content promotion from development, testing, and eventually to production easier, consider using the Content Migration Tool which is part of the Advanced Management capabilities included in Tableau Cloud Enterprise and Tableau+ editions. 

2. Set up department-specific sites

As the demand for data insights grows across organizations, admins need to adapt their governance strategy to meet the needs of new teams while maintaining data security. For instance, as your deployment grows in size and complexity, you may need to move from a project-based governance structure to site-based one. This might be because some teams that work with sensitive data, like HR or research teams, need their analytics siloed away from the rest of the organization. Setting up department-specific sites can enable functional teams to manage their data independently, and also adds more layers to your governance strategy to enhance data security.

Since Tableau Cloud Manager supports the self-service creation of multiple sites and management of users across sites, admins can securely and safely grow their deployment with ease. Before you create that new site, here’s a tip: Establishing department-specific sites should be a methodical process. We recommend evaluating the data security and regulatory requirements of each department you onboard to determine if they truly need a dedicated site or if they can slot into your existing, project-based governance strategy on your primary production site. 

3. Set up regional sites

If your organization operates globally, managing data access across different geographic regions is critical to your data governance and mitigating risks. It can also affect the analytics experience for your teams—regional sites can offer end users quicker load times and equitable access to data insights.

Regional sites help you comply with data regulations related to data residency, access and governance, usage, and more. This is particularly important for industries and teams with stringent data protection requirements, where non-compliance can lead to significant penalties and reputational damage.

When creating a new site in Tableau Cloud Manager, admins can select the region of their choice. Where you chose to have your site will depend on where your users are located and on your company, industry, and regional compliance standards. If you have users that need to access multiple regional sites, you can add and manage those users across multiple sites with no additional licensing costs, ensuring proper data access and governance across your global business.

Create a new Tableau Cloud site

Spinning up a new site is easy, and you can choose to deploy it to any available Tableau Cloud region—here’s how you do it! (Pro tip: If you’re onboarding brand new Tableau users to a new site and need more licenses, click the “Buy More Licenses” button in Tableau Cloud Manager to quickly add licenses.)

Not yet a Tableau Cloud customer? You can try it for free today—Tableau Cloud Manager is included as part of your trial experience.