Data Governance on GCP 2026: A Practical Decision Guide

A practical 2026 guide to data governance on Google Cloud: the four questions every program must answer, and the exact services that answer them — Knowledge Catalog (Dataplex), Sensitive Data Protection, BigQuery policy tags, and VPC Service Controls — with a comparison table and a decision guide.

"Who can see this data?" sounds like a one-line question. In a real organization it is four questions wearing a trench coat, and if you cannot answer all four, you do not have data governance — you have a spreadsheet of good intentions.

Full deep-dive — Data governance on GCP in 2026: catalog, DLP discovery, BigQuery policy tags and VPC Service Controls, mapped to four questions, with a table and decision guide:

👉 alekseialeinikov.com/en/blog/topics/data/data-governance-gcp-2026

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