1. What is Metadata Scanning? Metadata is data that describes other data or gives context to data. You can use metadata for several tasks in business, including tagging data entries in a large volume of information for easier archival and retrieval. Metadata is also used in data visualization software applications like Microsoft’s Power BI. Empower your insights with precision – Unleash the future of data integrity and security. Explore our anomaly detection data platform now for unparalleled accuracy. Click to safeguard your information! Power BI is a data visualization tool that uses metadata scanning within its anomaly detection data platform. An anomaly detection data platform is software that looks for strange data behaviors that fall outside normal patterns. These anomalous behaviors may indicate suspicious activity is taking place and further investigation is warranted. How Does Metadata Scanning Work? Metadata scanning works by first analyzing a document or file to identify its elements. Metadata helps with this since a document’s metadata identifies what data is and what categories it belongs to. Metadata involving processes like file access can also be scanned to determine what type of access someone had to a file at a given time. Next, metadata is extracted and sent to the cloud for further parsing. One of the reasons for sending this data to a cloud-based solution is that cloud computing can help process very large volumes of data faster. If you were to analyze a single document with only a few pages of data, your organization would likely have no problem running parsing applications locally. For data involving many thousands of documents or more, a cloud-based solution will likely be much faster. How Do Metadata Scanning and Anomaly Detection Work Together? In terms of the relationship between anomaly detection and metadata scanning, the two work hand-in-hand. Metadata scanning can identify anomalies using anomaly detection solutions, and cloud-based applications can parse the results of a scan to interpret the results. Once again, these solutions are often most beneficial to large organizations that have huge volumes or libraries of files to scan. An enterprise-level organization that has archived millions of customer records over the course of decades would have a very hard time manually scanning and comparing metadata by hand. Software like Power BI can speed these processes up and also provide an analysis of anomalies to help companies make stronger data security decisions.