Question

A financial services company is consolidating dozens of BigQuery datasets across multiple projects. Analysts complain they cannot easily discover which tables exist or determine which columns contain sensitive PII such as national IDs and account numbers. The compliance team requires that sensitive columns be automatically identified and tagged so that access policies can be applied consistently. Which approach best meets these data governance requirements with the least custom development?

Accepted Answer

Use Dataplex with Data Catalog to index the datasets, and run Cloud DLP inspection jobs to automatically detect and tag columns containing PII, then attach policy tags for column-level access control.

Answer

Export all table schemas to a spreadsheet, manually review each column for sensitive data, and document access rules in a shared wiki for analysts to reference.

Answer

Grant all analysts the BigQuery Data Viewer role at the organization level so they can browse every dataset and self-identify sensitive fields.

Answer

Write a custom Cloud Function that scans table names with regular expressions to guess which tables hold PII and emails a report to the compliance team weekly.