SAIC Volkswagen Partnered with Dataphin to Build a Comprehensive Data Asset System with Integrated Security Governance

This article introduces how SAIC Volkswagen partnered with Alibaba Cloud's Dataphin to build a unified, secure, and searchable enterprise data asset system.

10000+	6	1 set
Data objects	Core businesses	Data asset catalogs

Dataphin has become the core engine for our data lifecycle management, encompassing acquisition, construction, management, and application. It has made data development and collaboration across business lines such as R&D, production, supply, and sales standardized, transparent, and efficient, laying a solid foundation for SAIC Volkswagen's digital transformation.

—— Yin Dan, Senior Director of Information Systems at SAIC Volkswagen

Background and Business Challenges

SAIC Volkswagen Automotive Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "SAIC Volkswagen") was established in October 1984. It is a joint venture between SAIC Group and Volkswagen Group and is one of the oldest automotive joint ventures in China.

With the acceleration of digital transformation, SAIC Volkswagen has accumulated massive data assets across its R&D, production, supply, and sales business lines. As these data assets continue to expand, challenges arise, including fragmented data distribution, a lack of standardized cataloging, and room for improvement in integrating manual processes with tools in the data development workflow. These challenges lead to inconvenience in finding, understanding, and using tens of thousands of tables, fields, and metrics across various business departments, impacting the efficiency of data sharing and business applications, and also placing higher demands on data security and compliance management.

To this end, SAIC Volkswagen's data team proactively planned ahead and, in collaboration with Lingyang, systematically promoted the construction of a data governance and security system using the Dataphin product, focusing on the two core directions of "data assetization" and "data security". They also collaborated to create more than 200 optimization items tailored to the company's business scenarios, such as cross-tenant publishing and code review, which fully activated the value of data and ensured the safe and compliant use of data.

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Build a Manageable, Trustworthy, and Usable Enterprise-Level Data Asset System

Through the Dataphin platform, SAIC Volkswagen systematically sorted out more than 10,000 data objects, covering various types such as database tables, fields, business indicators, dimensions, and tags, and established a standardized data asset list covering the entire company for the first time. This list not only clarifies the business meaning, technical attributes, responsible parties, and usage scenarios of each data object, but also achieves visualized management of data assets through automated metadata collection and field-level lineage tracing. Based on this, SAIC Volkswagen has built a unified, stable, transparent, and easy-to-use data platform foundation around data development, asset listing, and user experience, completely solving the previous pain points of "data being invisible, difficult to find, and poorly utilized." Users can now categorize and quickly retrieve data assets across multiple dimensions, including projects and business domains, significantly improving data discovery efficiency and ease of use, and laying a solid foundation for data-driven decision-making.

At the same time, Dataphin's powerful code management and development collaboration capabilities effectively support the daily data development needs of SAIC Volkswagen's R&D, production, supply, and sales business lines. Leveraging Dataphin's unified development space, standardized task templates, visual DAG orchestration, and robust code version comparison and rollback mechanisms, SAIC Volkswagen has achieved closed-loop management across the entire process from requirements, development, testing to deployment. This significantly improves the readability, maintainability, and debugging efficiency of SQL and other data-related code. Furthermore, in development practice, SAIC Volkswagen's data team proposed enhancing the cross-tenant publishing function, including supporting more object types, refining parameters and error messages. This further improved the consistency of R&D specifications across teams and projects, and effectively reduced data quality issues and system risks caused by human error.

The successful implementation of Dataphin at SAIC Volkswagen has not only built a clear, reliable, and easy-to-use enterprise-level data asset system, but also reshaped the working paradigm of data development and governance. It has become the core engine for SAIC Volkswagen to achieve full lifecycle management of data "collection-construction-management-use", laying a solid foundation for digital transformation.

Establish an Integrated Data Security Center to Achieve Refined Access Control

As its data assets continue to expand, SAIC Volkswagen is also facing increasingly severe data security challenges.In the past, sensitive fields such as personal information were displayed in plaintext along with other ordinary data in the development environment. Access control only supported coarse-grained database sharding and table partitioning authorization, failing to achieve fine-grained control at the field or row level, leading to frequent instances of "over-allocation of permissions." In addition, encryption and decryption algorithms and key management were scattered across various business systems, lacking a unified governance platform, resulting in inconsistent enforcement of security policies; data permission applications relied on offline processes, changes were not recorded, auditing was difficult, and compliance and leakage risks existed.

To this end, SAIC Volkswagen has built an integrated data security center based on Dataphin, adhering to the core concepts of "classification and grading, precise control, dynamic protection, and full-process auditing".The system automatically identifies sensitive information based on features and classifies, grades, and labels the data; it enables flexible customization of desensitization strategies according to roles or scenarios through dynamic desensitization rules and whitelist mechanisms; and it strengthens security governance from the source of data collection through unified key and encryption algorithm management.

More importantly, SAIC Volkswagen's data platform developers integrated the company's internal SVWCP approval system with Dataphin, building a closed-loop management mechanism covering the entire process of "application—approval—authorization—use—revocation," enabling differentiated configuration of field-level permissions. Furthermore, they innovatively proposed using a Basic project + cross-tenant deployment model to achieve physical isolation between development and production, meaning that code is reviewed upon submission for deployment, and release is only permitted after approval.In this way, all permission operations and development operations are traceable and auditable, truly implementing the "principle of least privilege". While ensuring efficient data flow, it eliminates data usage security risks and compliance hazards, and strengthens the enterprise's data security defense.

Before

Data management systems are fragmented, and catalog standards are not yet unified.
The lack of unified development standards and collaboration processes hinders the improvement of overall R&D efficiency.
Risk of data breaches and misuse.

After

Build a unified data asset system to form a standardized, searchable, and visualized enterprise-level data asset catalog.
Improve code readability, version control, and cross-team development consistency through the Dataphin unified development platform.
Integrate with the SVWCP approval system to achieve a closed-loop process of "application—approval—authorization—use—recycling", ensuring full auditability and traceability.

Through the in-depth application of Dataphin, SAIC Volkswagen has successfully achieved data that is "clear, manageable, usable, and secure," which not only solidifies the foundation for digital transformation but also sets a new benchmark for data governance in the automotive industry in terms of both efficiency and security.

Community

SAIC Volkswagen Partnered with Dataphin to Build a Comprehensive Data Asset System with Integrated Security Governance

Background and Business Challenges

Build a Manageable, Trustworthy, and Usable Enterprise-Level Data Asset System

Establish an Integrated Data Security Center to Achieve Refined Access Control

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