Governance rules provide the business description of the required behavior or actions to be taken to implement a given governance policy. These are business descriptive rules and can't be enforced, unlike data protection rules.

A governance rule is a natural-language description of the criteria that are used to determine whether data assets are compliant with business objectives.

Policies and governance rules are based on governance subject areas that are important to your organization. Examples of governance subject areas might be information security, information privacy, or regulatory compliance.

When you create a governance rule, you give it a name and a text description. You can also specify referencing governance policies, assigned governance artifacts, stewards, and other properties of the rule. A governance rule can be referenced by multiple governance policies.

A governance rule can be related to other governance rules. For example, you might create a rule named "valid address" that is related to another rule named "valid city name." Related rule relationships are bidirectional. For example, if you specify that the rule "valid address" is related to the rule "valid city name," then "valid city name" is automatically related to "valid address."

A governance rule can also be related to data quality definitions and data quality rules. These relationships are defined on the asset and show up as Related content.