Restrict Data Visibility in IBM SaaS Asset Preview, Profiling, Visualization, and Catalog

Organizations often onboard sensitive, regulated, or confidential datasets into IBM SaaS environments for governance, lineage, metadata management, and data product publication. While business and technical metadata should remain discoverable, the actual data content should not be exposed within the platform.

I propose a capability to disable or restrict access to data values across the following areas:

• Asset Preview
• Data Profiling
• Data Visualization
• Catalog Published Assets

This would allow users to discover, govern, and request access to data assets without exposing underlying records or sample data. Metadata such as schema, column names, descriptions, ownership, classifications, lineage, quality scores, and governance information should remain available, while data content remains hidden.

Benefits:

• Improved protection of sensitive and regulated data.
• Reduced risk of unauthorized data exposure.
• Better alignment with privacy, security, and compliance requirements.
• Supports metadata-driven governance without requiring data visibility.
• Enables organizations to safely publish data assets to catalogs while maintaining strict control over data access.

How it should work: Provide an asset-level or catalog-level configuration that allows administrators or data owners to:

• Hide asset preview data.
• Disable profiling results that expose data values.
• Disable visualization features that render actual data.
• Publish metadata-only assets to catalogs.
• Apply the setting through governance policies or classifications for sensitive datasets.