Introducing restricted classification terms for governed classification in Amazon SageMaker Catalog

Security and compliance concerns are key considerations when customers across industries rely on Amazon SageMaker Catalog. Customers use SageMaker Catalog to organize, discover, and govern data and machine learning (ML) assets. A common request from domain administrators is the ability to enforce governance controls on certain metadata terms that carry compliance or policy significance. Examples include terms used to classify assets with sensitive data (such as PHI in healthcare or PCI in financial services) or terms used to trigger automatic access grants based on regulatory or organizational policies.

AWS announced restricted classification terms in SageMaker Catalog. This new capability allows domain administrators to define governance-controlled terms and enforce which teams and users are authorized to apply them. Restricted classification terms are designed to allow organizations to set standards for consistent classification of sensitive data, help prevent misuse of regulatory tags, and enable downstream workflows such as automatic access grants across the enterprise.

Restricted classification (glossary) terms

Customers have told us that the flexibility of applying glossary terms in SageMaker Catalog has been valuable for collaboration and scale. At the same time, many enterprises—especially in regulated industries—wanted an additional layer of control for certain classifications. For example, terms like PHI (Protected Health Information) in healthcare or PCI (payment card industry) in financial services should only be applied by authorized personnel, because they carry compliance and policy significance. Customers also asked for a way to enforce these governance policies without adding operational overhead. As catalogs grow to thousands of assets, forms, and columns, validating tens of thousands of terms can create performance and compliance challenges. A solution was needed to combine the openness of cataloging with governance precision for sensitive use cases.With this launch, SageMaker Catalog introduces a restricted classification terms section on each asset:

• Business glossary terms (existing): Open tagging, no restrictions.
• Restricted glossary terms (new): Only authorized users or groups can apply terms. Unauthorized users can view and filter assets based on these terms but not assign them.

Customer spotlight

As a large-scale organization with diverse data needs, the Business Data Technologies (BDT) team at Amazon manages thousands of assets across business units. Making sure these assets are consistently classified and governed is critical to maintaining compliance and enabling secure data sharing at scale. With restricted classification terms in SageMaker Catalog, the BDT team can now enforce which groups are authorized to apply terms, such as policy-driven classifications for merchants or payment data, while keeping discovery seamless for users.

“Restricted classification terms are instrumental in helping us scale data onboarding and governance across Amazon. By enforcing who can apply policy-related terms in the Amazon SageMaker Catalog, we’re able to accelerate consolidation of data assets across business units without compromising compliance. This facilitates consistent classification, prevents misuse, and allows us to automate downstream access grants—enabling our builders to innovate quickly while maintaining the highest standards of governance.”

– Gerry Moses, Senior Principal Technologist, Business Data Technologies, Amazon

Key benefits

With the introduction of restricted classification terms, customers gain stronger governance controls without losing the flexibility of open cataloging. This capability is designed to provide customers with the following key benefits:

• Governance enforcement – Sensitive terms such as PHI or PCI can only be applied by approved users or groups, supporting compliance with organizational and regulatory policies.
• Consistency at scale – Helps prevent misclassification across thousands of assets, maintaining a single source of truth for governed terms across domains and projects.
• Automatic access workflows – Restricted terms can trigger downstream policies, such as auto-granting access to regulated projects or routing assets to compliance-approved environments.

Sample use case

A pharmaceutical company uses SageMaker Catalog to manage clinical trial data. They define a glossary called Regulated Data Categories with restricted terms like PHI and Genomic Data. Only compliance-approved data stewards are authorized to apply these terms to assets. When applied, the term PHI can automatically trigger policies that restrict access only to approved research groups or environments with HIPAA compliance enabled. This makes sure clinical datasets containing PHI to be consistently tagged and subject to the right access policies, while still discoverable for approved researchers.

A retail bank manages transaction and credit data in its domain catalog. They create a glossary called Data Sensitivity Levels with restricted terms like PCI and Credit Bureau Data. When an authorized risk officer classifies an asset with PCI, SageMaker Catalog can automatically grant access only to members of the bank’s Payments Compliance project. Other users, such as analysts in marketing, can see the classification exists but cannot apply or override it. This approach helps prevent accidental misuse of sensitive financial terms while automating secure access grants aligned with regulatory requirements.

Solution overview

In this section, we will walk through how to create and apply restricted classification terms.

Prerequisites

To follow this post, you should have an Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio domain set up with a domain owner or domain unit owner privileges. You should also have existing projects or permissions to create new projects and business glossaries. For instructions to create them, see the Getting started guide. In this post, we created a project named Clinical Study Trials.

Create a restricted business glossary

In this step, a compliance officer creates a new glossary called Regulated Data Categories and marks it as restricted. Usage grants are given to the Clinical Data Stewardship project.

1. Log in to your Amazon SageMaker Unified Studio (off-console) portal. Select the project, navigate to Business Glossaries tab and choose Create Glossary.
   
2. Enter a name and description for the glossary. Select Restrict this glossary for governed term use and choose Add projects.
   
3. Select the projects that should have permissions to tag governed terms to assets. Choose Add policy grant.
   
4. Choose Create to create the restricted business glossary.
   
5. The Regulated Data Categories business glossary is created and ready to populate.
   

Add restricted business glossary terms

In this step you will add two terms: PHI and Genomic Data to the glossary.

1. Choose Create term.
   
2. Enter a Name and Description. Turn on Enabled and choose Create term.
   
3. Follow the same steps to add the second term and both terms should be available in the glossary.
   

Apply restricted glossary terms to classify assets

In this step, a data steward will publish a new asset and apply the restricted terms.

1. Go to the Data Steward project and navigate to the asset where Restricted Terms should be tagged and choose Add terms.
   
2. From Regulated Data Categories select PHI and Genomic Data and choose Add terms.
   
3. Restricted terms are attached to the asset.
   

If a project that doesn’t have grants to use restricted term tries to attach restricted terms, you would receive the error Unable to apply restricted terms.

Search and discovery

Data consumers can search for assets and filter by restricted terms filters on the left filters tab (for example, PHI or PCI) to discover governed assets.

Cleanup

If you decide that you no longer need any of the assets first unpublish assets, deleted terms, delete business glossary, delete assets and delete the new projects.

Conclusion

As customers expand their use of SageMaker Catalog, the need for governance becomes clear. From our work with customers in healthcare, life sciences, and financial services, we learned that organizations value the flexibility of open cataloging but need precise controls for terms that carry compliance or policy weight.

Restricted classification terms are designed to bring the best of both worlds: Flexibility for builders to continue tagging and discovering assets, and governance precision to help ensure that sensitive classifications are applied consistently. This capability lays the foundation for future enhancements such as column-level governance and deeper integration with enterprise data governance services. By balancing openness with control, SageMaker Catalog continues to help customers organize, govern, and scale their data and ML assets with confidence.

To learn more and get started, visit the Amazon SageMaker Catalog documentation.

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