Data Governance Is a Security Control, Not a Compliance Checkbox

I’ve spent years fixing broken Glue jobs and Lake Formation permissions as an AWS support engineer, then moved to pre-sales architecture for banking data platforms. One pattern shows up in almost every migration: teams build IAM policies and a data catalog as two separate workstreams, run by two separate teams, that never talk to each other. Then six months post-launch, someone asks, “Who can see the SSN column in the gold layer?” and nobody can answer without a week of manual auditing.