Welcome to the era of data domination! Every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data flood the digital landscape, estimates Forbes, with a whopping 90% of data created in just the last two years. While this growth presents many opportunities for organizations, it also introduces many challenges. That’s where data governance comes in.
It’s a critical practice for businesses trying to navigate data management and data security. It provides a framework for defining data ownership and data security, establishing accountability, improving data quality, enabling access controls, and ensuring regulatory compliance.
It’s important to remember that data governance isn’t a one-and-done item on a checklist. Instead, it’s an ongoing process that requires collaboration across your organization, from senior leadership down. Unfortunately, a recent Cognopia study found that “54% of firms state that their senior stakeholders are either not interested or poorly engaged in data governance.”
Want to be part of the 46% interested and engaging in data governance? Then, let’s dive in!
What Is Data Governance?
Data governance is essential to any company’s success. It’s all about the policies, processes, and controls to ensure data is available, secure, and accurate and the technology used to enable it. Yet, nearly half of companies lack a centralized policy governing data creation, use, storage, and archival.
To establish a robust data governance program, there are several responsibilities companies must undertake, including:
- Data strategy: Define the goals and objectives related to data management and usage.
- Data governance framework: Establish a framework that outlines data governance roles, responsibilities, and processes.
- Data standards: Develop guidelines for data collection, storage, sharing, retention, and disposal.
- Data access: Establish protocols for granting access to data, internally and externally, in line with data privacy and security requirements.
- Data quality: Implement processes to validate data to ensure its accuracy, consistency, and completeness.
These responsibilities contribute to a cohesive data governance program that helps ensure data availability, integrity, and security within an organization.
What Are the Benefits?
Improve Costs & Resource Management
With an unimpeded flow of protected data, organizations can utilize said-data to reduce or eliminate data duplication processes, allowing teams to manage budgets and resources more effectively with fewer tools.
Enhance Productivity & Decision-Making
Effective data governance results in higher data accuracy, consistency, and reliability. With better-quality data, organizations can gain better insights and make more informed decisions while also enhancing productivity.
Reduce Risks
The right data governance procedures allow data teams to track, catalog, and assess on and off-premise access, providing clarity into security gaps and preventing sensitive data exposure, unauthorized access, and breach risks.
Earn Customer Trust & Build Loyalty
Customer trust and loyalty come from organizations investing the effort into consistent customer data protection. Data governance allows data teams to take the proper steps to ensure persistent data protection, reducing the risk of leaked or ransomed customer data and maintaining their reputation.
Open Secure Data Channels
Data governance enables organizations to identify and inventory their data, which is essential for a comprehensive view of data across the business. Additionally, by promoting data integration and interoperability, data governance fosters collaboration, reduces data duplication, and ensures reliable data access, helping break down previously siloed data.
Improve Regulatory Compliance Alignment
One of the key reasons data governance is essential is to help organizations meet regulatory requirements, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). By implementing data governance measures, organizations can establish processes to protect sensitive data in accordance with various laws.
The Business Impact of Effective Data Governance
Companies that embrace data governance best practices will see significant impacts across the business. First, effective data governance fosters a data-driven culture that empowers teams to make informed decisions, driving innovation and efficiency throughout the organization. Plus, it gives you a competitive advantage by allowing you to extract meaningful patterns, trends, and customer preferences.
With a well-structured data ecosystem, you can identify previously untapped opportunities, develop targeted strategies, and ultimately outperform your competitors. Lastly, robust data governance significantly reduces potential risks associated with data breaches by establishing clear data guidelines, protocols, and security measures.
Data Governance Platform Requirements
To enact data governance best practices, organizations must consider several key data governance platform requirements:
- Scalability: A robust data governance platform will scale seamlessly to address the organization’s evolving data needs and be able to adapt to changing business requirements.
- Data Discovery: The most effective data governance platforms will have the ability to not only identify sensitive data but classify and protect it.
- Audit and Compliance Reporting: Data governance platforms must provide detailed logs of all data-related activities to enable compliance reporting and facilitate audits.
- Access Control: Granular access controls are essential to data governance. The best-choice data governance platforms will allow organizations to enable fine-grained access controls so only authorized people can view, change, or use specific data.
- Integration: Your data governance platform should integrate seamlessly with your existing data infrastructure and technology without requiring additional tools or costs.
Enhance Your Data Governance Program with the Protegrity Borderless Data™ Solution
The Protegrity Borderless Data Solution protects sensitive data across your organization and is a crucial component of any data governance program. It easily integrates with your existing tech stack to enable data discovery and classification, audit reporting, and granular access control, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and providing transparency into data access and usage. By securing data via tokenization, providing detailed data logs, and enabling compliance reporting, the Protegrity Borderless Data Solution ™ goes beyond data governance. It enables cross-border data flow by fulfilling many of the most stringent data protection requirements in global data regulations, such as GDPR.
Contact Protegrity today to learn more about how the Borderless Data Solution ™ enables data governance best practices.