From Data Portability to Governance Portability: The Next Frontier for the Open Lakehouse

Your enterprise runs Unity Catalog, Snowflake, Lake Formation, BigQuery — and probably one or two more. PII gets tagged in one catalog, masked in another, and ignored in a third. Open table formats gave us data portability, but governance metadata is still stuck inside each catalog’s policy engine and identity model. This talk explores labels exchange: carrying catalog metadata (e.g. governance tags, business metadata) through Apache Iceberg REST catalogs. We’ll cover why cross-engine governance is becoming the next federated data pain point, how Unity Catalog is pushing this pattern, what is emerging in Apache Iceberg, and what teams should look for when evaluating multi-platform architectures in 2026