Continuous Compliance in DCT uses a centralized architecture that separates configuration management from job execution. DCT manages compliance configuration and coordinates job execution. Execution infrastructure performs masking operations when jobs run. This design allows compliance configuration to remain centralized while execution capacity scales independently.
The following sections describe the components that coordinate job execution and the lifecycle of a compliance job.
Core components
Job Orchestrators
A Job Orchestrator controls job placement and execution flow. The orchestrator queues jobs, monitors available execution capacity, and assigns jobs to registered compliance nodes. An orchestrator represents a logical grouping of execution infrastructure. Orchestrators are often organized by:
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geography
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data center location
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network locality
This configuration helps keep data sources and execution infrastructure close together, which improves performance.
When a connector is created in DCT, it is associated with a specific orchestrator. This association propagates to related objects such as rule sets and compliance jobs.
Compliance Node
A Compliance Node represents a registered execution instance of a Continuous Compliance Engine. Nodes provide the compute capacity required to run compliance jobs. Each node is associated with a job orchestrator and participates in that orchestrator’s execution pool. When a job on DCT runs, the orchestrator assigns the job to an available node. These nodes do not store configuration locally. Instead, DCT delivers configuration to the engine when a job starts. Because the execution model is stateless, configuration objects are created only during job execution and cleaned up afterwards. This allows multiple jobs to run concurrently without configuration conflicts.
Compliance Job
A Compliance Job defines how sensitive data should be processed.
Compliance jobs can perform:
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Discovery, which identifies and classifies sensitive data in connected data sources.
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Masking, which transforms sensitive data using masking algorithms.
A compliance job references connectors, rule sets, algorithms, data classes, classifiers, discovery policies, and execution settings that determine how data is processed.
Job Execution
A Job Execution represents a single runtime instance of a compliance job. During execution, the system records:
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execution status
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logs
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job metrics
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results
All execution information is stored centrally in DCT.
Job execution flow
When a compliance job is executed, DCT coordinates the runtime workflow.
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A user starts a compliance job in DCT.
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DCT determines the Job Orchestrator responsible for the job implicitly through the ruleset-connector.
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The job is placed in the orchestrator queue.
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DCT delivers configuration information to the compliance node.
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The node executes the masking job.
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Execution status and metrics are reported back to DCT.
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After execution completes, results and execution metadata are stored in DCT.
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The configuration information is cleaned up on the node after job-execution.
Job execution states
During execution, compliance jobs move through several states.
| State | Description |
|---|---|
| Submitted | The job has been initiated but not yet assigned execution capacity |
| Queued | The job is waiting for available execution resources |
| Running | The job is actively executing |
| Completed | The job finished successfully |
| Failed | The job stopped because of an error |