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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2026-08-07
Workday Data Cloud

Workday Data Cloud

You might need to take additional steps to enable this feature depending on your organization's subscription service agreement. For more information, see this Community article.
Workday Data Cloud is only available in public-cloud-hosted Implementation tenants.

Introduction

Workday Data Cloud facilitates bidirectional data exchange between the Workday platform and external enterprise data environments. Data Cloud utilizes open standards like Apache Iceberg and Trino to allow external systems to access Workday data - and Workday to access external system data - without requiring time-consuming extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) processes.

Overview

Data Exchange Direction
Data Cloud Component
Connection
Description
Data Out:
Workday Data to External Systems
JDBC, Python, Power BI
Use for targeted queries requiring real-time freshness.
Available Data
Selected Workday business objects exposed as SQL tables. See Data Cloud Catalog.
Access
  • ISU authentication for table-level & column-level access controls.
  • User-as-self authentication for fully enforced Workday security model.
Additional Features:
  • Live data.
  • Open connectivity from Data Platforms and Analytics Tools.
Apache Iceberg
Use for large-scale analytics or data warehousing where periodic refresh is acceptable.
Available Data
Selected Workday business objects exposed as Iceberg tables. See Data Cloud Catalog.
Access:
  • Table-level access controls.
Additional Features:
  • Daily refresh.
  • More performant high-volume raw extracts.
  • Data platform connectivity.
Data In:
External Data into Workday
Prism Data Catalog connection
Use to access zero-copy data from external systems directly within Workday.
Access:
  • Prism security domains and roles.
Additional Features:
  • Prism Data Management capabilities (Examples: Joins, calculated fields, data lifecycle management)
For further information on Use Cases, Questions to Consider, and Security, see Setup Considerations: Workday Data Cloud.