Your Guide to Information Governance Best Practices
Information governance is often viewed strictly through the lens of security and compliance, but its benefits run much deeper. When data is poorly managed, teams waste valuable time searching for files, working with outdated information, or recreating work that already exists. This operational drag slows down innovation and hinders smart decision-making. A solid governance plan brings order to that chaos. By establishing clear ownership, quality standards, and lifecycle policies, you create a reliable foundation for everything from daily tasks to advanced analytics. Implementing the best practices for information governance does more than reduce risk; it streamlines your entire operation and makes your data truly work for you.
In today’s digital world, almost every company has sensitive data that must be protected from unauthorized access. In 2021, the U.S. had the highest average total cost of data breaches at $9.05 million. Ensuring your data is protected is critical to keeping your business running.
If your company stores confidential information in email accounts, databases, document management systems or unstructured files on network drives or local computers, it’s imperative you develop a strong information governance plan to protect your data from cyber threats.
A sound information governance (IG) plan can help reduce risks associated with confidential data and other records and prevent accidental or malicious disclosures of private information. With the right IG practices in place, your company can not only remain compliant with necessary regulations, but also avoid any potential audit failures related to privacy and security concerns.
What is Information Governance (And Why Does It Matter)?
Information governance is the process by which an organization manages the collection, storage, access and distribution of information. The goal of information governance is to keep sensitive information secure while still allowing employees to do their jobs. It’s a strategy which ensures the right people have the right access to the right information at the right time.
From a regulatory compliance perspective, information governance is important for two main reasons. First, it ensures your organization has a means of enforcing its policies and procedures. Second, it provides a way of ensuring the data your organization collects and stores is secure, and the individuals whose data ends up in the organization’s systems can be confident it will be kept confidential and secure.
The Growing Challenge of Data Management
Every business is creating a staggering amount of data each day. This information is a powerful asset, but it can quickly become a liability if it’s not managed correctly. Information governance provides the framework for this management, acting as a set of rules for how your organization creates, handles, stores, and eventually disposes of its data. This isn't just about databases; it includes everything from paper files and phone records to emails and spreadsheets. A strong governance plan helps you extract the most value from your information while reducing risks and staying compliant with critical regulations like HIPAA and CCPA. Without a clear strategy, data can become siloed, unsecured, or lost, which is why many organizations turn to a partner to help implement and maintain a robust cybersecurity and data management framework.
Beyond Risk: The Broader Benefits of Governance
While information governance is essential for security and compliance, its benefits extend far beyond risk mitigation. Getting your data in order is a tough job, but it’s achievable with clear policies and consistent effort. The result is that company leaders gain much better control and access to their most important digital information. This control fuels operational efficiency, lays the groundwork for advanced analytics and AI, prevents duplicate data, and can even lower storage costs. When your team can find what they need quickly and reliably, everything runs more smoothly. A well-governed data environment is the foundation for strategic initiatives like cloud transformation and innovation, turning your data from a potential risk into a true business accelerator.
Assembling Your Information Governance Team
An information governance plan is not a document that can be created by one department and filed away. To be effective, it needs to be a living strategy built and maintained by a dedicated group of people from across your organization. Success depends on collaboration and clear lines of responsibility. Without a designated team to champion the effort, even the best-laid plans can fall short, failing to gain traction or adapt to changing business needs and security threats. Building this team is the first practical step toward turning governance from an abstract concept into a concrete business advantage.
This group will be responsible for defining policies, overseeing implementation, and ensuring the program remains aligned with your company’s goals. While your internal experts will drive this, partnering with an external team can provide a valuable outside perspective. A cybersecurity partner can help your team identify potential gaps, navigate complex compliance requirements, and implement the right technologies to support your governance framework, ensuring your strategy is both comprehensive and resilient against emerging threats.
Create a Cross-Functional Team
One of the most common mistakes is treating information governance as solely an IT or legal problem. While these departments are critical, a truly effective strategy requires input from every part of the business that creates or uses data. Your governance team should be a cross-functional group that includes representatives from compliance, risk management, HR, data privacy, security, and key business units. This diversity of perspectives is essential for creating policies that are both robust and practical for day-to-day operations.
When you bring together people from different departments, you ensure the rules work for everyone. For example, your sales team can provide insight into how customer data is used, while HR can speak to the sensitivities of employee records. This collaborative approach not only helps manage legal and compliance risks more effectively but also fosters a culture of shared responsibility for data protection across the entire organization, making your governance plan much easier to implement and maintain.
Assign Data Stewards for Clear Ownership
A successful governance program relies on clear accountability. This is where the role of a data steward becomes essential. Data stewardship is the practice of assigning individuals or teams to be formally responsible for specific data assets within the organization. These stewards aren't necessarily from IT; they are often leaders within the business units that know the data best. For instance, the head of finance might be the steward for financial data, while the marketing director oversees customer data.
These stewards are tasked with defining data rules, ensuring data quality, and making sure everyone who uses their assigned data follows company policies. According to the experts at Actian, this is one of the key pillars of data governance because it establishes clear ownership. When someone is directly responsible for a dataset, it’s far more likely to be accurate, secure, and properly managed. This clarity simplifies everything from daily operations to responding to audit requests, as you always know who to turn to for answers about specific information.
Developing Your Information Governance Framework
Building a solid IG framework is less about writing a single document and more about creating a strategic, living process. It requires a clear understanding of your data landscape and a collaborative approach to managing it effectively. By following a structured plan, you can create a framework that protects your information, ensures compliance, and supports your business goals without getting in the way of daily operations. This proactive approach turns governance from a restrictive chore into a strategic advantage, ensuring your data works for you, safely and efficiently.
Step 1: Assemble Your Team and Map Your Data
Start by breaking down silos. Information governance isn't just an IT or legal issue; it's a business-wide responsibility. Your first move should be to create a cross-functional team with representatives from IT, legal, compliance, HR, and key business units. This ensures your policies are practical and have buy-in from everyone. Once your team is in place, the next critical task is to figure out exactly what data you have. You can't govern what you can't see. Conduct a thorough data inventory to create a "data map" that details what information you store, where it lives (including old backup tapes and cloud archives), who uses it, and why it's being kept. This foundational step is essential for meeting modern data privacy regulations.
Step 2: Create and Implement Clear Policies
With a clear view of your data, you can build the rules of the road. Your policies should define the entire information lifecycle, from creation to disposal. This includes establishing clear data retention schedules based on legal and regulatory requirements for your industry. A key part of this is defining a process for defensible deletion—securely getting rid of data you no longer need to reduce your risk profile and storage costs. Finally, a policy is only effective if people follow it. Implement ongoing training to ensure every employee understands their role in protecting company data. This helps build a strong security culture where information governance is a shared responsibility, not just a checklist for the cybersecurity team.
Start by Auditing Your Data
Data audits are important for identifying data sources, data types and locations so you can implement the right IG policies and procedures to secure your data. A data audit will help you analyze the amount of data in various forms which your organization stores, and identifies where it’s being stored, who is accessing it and why, and the risks associated with storing the data.
Conducting data audits are an important part of determining your IG strategy. They help determine how to manage and secure your data so your organization can avoid fines and penalties associated with data breaches, data misuse and non-compliance with regulatory requirements for protecting critical data.
Create a Comprehensive Data Map
Once your audit gives you a list of your data assets, the next step is to create a data map. Think of this as a blueprint that shows you exactly where your sensitive information is stored, how it moves through your organization, and who has access to it. You can't effectively protect what you don't fully understand, and a data map provides the clarity needed to build a strong governance strategy. It transforms your raw audit findings into a visual, actionable guide that highlights potential risks and helps you make informed decisions about security policies and access controls, ensuring your governance plan is based on reality, not assumptions.
Building this map starts with a complete data inventory. This process needs to be exhaustive, going beyond active databases and cloud services. As the team at Exterro notes, you need to know about everything, including "old backup tapes, retired software, and archived files." These forgotten data repositories are often unsecured and can pose a significant compliance risk. By creating a thorough inventory of all your data, you establish a single source of truth that accounts for every piece of information your organization holds, which is the only way to ensure your governance policies cover all potential vulnerabilities.
A data map is more than just a list of locations; it’s an analysis of access and risk. A proper audit helps you understand not only where data is but also who is accessing it, why they need it, and the risks tied to that storage and access. This process is a key part of improving information governance and is fundamental to mitigating threats. For instance, you might discover that sensitive customer information is accessible by more departments than necessary, creating an unnecessarily large attack surface. Pinpointing these vulnerabilities is a critical step in refining your cybersecurity posture and preventing potential data breaches.
Perform a Gap Analysis
Once you have a clear picture of your data landscape from your audit, the next step is to perform a gap analysis. This process is all about comparing the current state of your information management practices against your desired state—the one that meets all regulatory and security requirements. An effective information governance strategy relies on all its components, like policies, technology, and legal knowledge, working together seamlessly. A gap analysis helps you find the weak links in that chain, creating a clear roadmap for improvement by systematically identifying weaknesses in your programs and information systems. This allows you to take targeted actions to strengthen your overall cybersecurity posture and ensure compliance. Remember, this isn't a one-time task; just as you need to keep your data map current, you should periodically review your governance framework to adapt to new threats and regulations.
Understand Your Legal and Compliance Duties
Another important IG best practice is to assess legal and regulatory requirements for protecting sensitive data. Identify which data your organization collects, uses or stores, and then determine which of this data is considered to be sensitive. Next, determine which government agencies, industry organizations or regulatory bodies oversee the protection of this sensitive data.
These requirements determine, for example, whether a data set needs to be anonymized before being shared with third parties, or if it is permissible to share it in bulk. They also define when and how a breach must be reported, which can be critical in ensuring your company responds quickly and appropriately when sensitive data is compromised.
Identify Key Regulations That Apply to You
The specific rules you need to follow depend heavily on your industry and where you do business. For example, if you handle data from EU citizens, you're subject to GDPR. In healthcare, HIPAA sets the standard, while financial firms must follow laws like the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA). It's crucial to identify which government agencies or industry bodies oversee the protection of your sensitive data. Your first step is to map the types of information you collect—personal, financial, health—to the corresponding legal frameworks. This process goes beyond a simple checklist; these regulations define critical operational requirements, such as when a data set must be anonymized before sharing or how quickly a breach must be reported.
Meeting these obligations is fundamental to a resilient information governance plan. Non-compliance can result in steep fines and, more critically, erode customer trust. A strong cybersecurity posture is non-negotiable for satisfying these requirements, ensuring your technical controls are perfectly aligned with your legal duties. For many internal IT teams already managing complex systems, navigating the nuances of compliance can feel like a full-time job. Partnering with an expert can help bridge any gaps, providing the specialized knowledge needed to translate legal jargon into actionable security policies. This allows your team to focus on strategic initiatives while ensuring your organization meets its regulatory responsibilities with confidence.
Build a Strategy to Manage Your Data Assets
A data asset management (DAM) strategy is another IG best practice that will help your organization identify the data it stores and the risks associated with the data. Once you’ve identified the data assets your organization stores, you can develop DAM strategies for how your business will manage, maintain and securely store the data.
A DAM strategy will help your organization decide which data to protect and how to store it. Data assets can include customer records, employee information, financial information, third-party data, healthcare data and other types of sensitive data your business collects, uses or stores.
You can use a DAM strategy to identify which data assets your organization should protect and how, as well as selecting the best tools, technologies and policies for safeguarding the data.
Prioritize Data Quality and Integrity
A core part of your data management strategy is ensuring the information you rely on is actually reliable. Data quality isn't just a technical term; it means your data is correct, complete, and trustworthy. When you're working with inaccurate or incomplete information, you risk making poor strategic decisions that can lead to financial loss and damage your company's reputation. On the other hand, high-quality data is a powerful asset. It allows you to make smarter business moves, improve customer experiences, find cost savings, and effectively leverage advanced technologies like AI and machine learning.
Develop a Data Architecture Plan
Think of data architecture as the blueprint for your organization's information. It maps out how data is collected, how it flows between systems, and where it's stored, whether in on-premise databases or as part of your cloud solutions. A well-designed data architecture is essential for operational efficiency. It helps prevent data duplication, which saves on storage costs, and makes information easier for your teams to find and use. More importantly, a solid architectural plan is the foundation for advanced analytics and AI initiatives, ensuring your data is structured to support complex queries and future growth.
Manage Metadata and Master Data
To maintain data consistency across your entire organization, you need to focus on master data and metadata. Master Data Management (MDM) is the practice of creating a single, authoritative source for your most critical data, like customer names or product codes, ensuring it's uniform across all systems. This prevents confusion and errors. At the same time, managing your metadata—the data about your data—is just as important. It provides context and instructions, helping your teams understand what the data means and how to use it correctly and efficiently, which is a cornerstone of effective governance.
Integrate a Disaster Recovery Plan
Even the best-managed data is vulnerable to disruption from cyberattacks, hardware failures, or natural disasters. That's why a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan is a non-negotiable part of information governance. This plan should clearly outline the steps to take if a major incident causes data loss, ensuring you can recover critical information and restore operations with minimal downtime. Partnering with an expert in managed IT services can help you build and test a resilient DR strategy that protects your data assets and ensures business continuity when the unexpected happens.
Putting Your Plan into Action
A well-defined framework is an excellent start, but the real value of information governance comes from implementation. Turning your strategy into a set of daily practices requires a coordinated effort across your organization. The following steps will help you translate your plan into a living, breathing part of your company's operations, ensuring your data is consistently managed and protected. This is where you build the operational muscle to enforce your policies and create a culture of security and accountability from the ground up.
Create a Cross-Functional IG Team
Information governance isn't just an IT or legal problem; it's a business-wide initiative. To create policies that actually work, you need input from all corners of the company. Bring together leaders from compliance, risk management, HR, and key business units alongside your IT and legal experts. This collaborative approach ensures the rules are practical for daily operations and helps manage legal and operational risks effectively. A team with diverse perspectives can anticipate challenges and build a more resilient governance framework from the start, making company-wide adoption much smoother.
Develop and Document Your Policies
With your team in place, it's time to formalize your strategy. This means creating clear, documented policies for how data is handled from creation to deletion. You'll need to define who can access what information, how it should be stored, and when it must be securely destroyed. A critical part of this process is understanding the specific data retention laws for your industry and location. This knowledge allows you to confidently and legally dispose of data you no longer need, reducing your storage footprint and potential attack surface while maintaining compliance.
Train Your Entire Organization
An information governance plan is only as strong as the people who follow it. For your strategy to succeed, every employee needs to understand their role in protecting company data. Implement comprehensive training that explains the new policies and, more importantly, the reasons behind them. When your team understands why these rules are critical for security and compliance, they are far more likely to become active participants in safeguarding information. This builds a security-conscious culture where IG is a shared responsibility, not just a mandate from management.
Monitor, Audit, and Refine
Information governance is not a set-it-and-forget-it project. Your business, technology, and the regulatory landscape are constantly changing, and your IG plan must adapt. Schedule regular audits to check that policies are being followed and are still effective. These reviews are also an opportunity to identify data that has reached the end of its lifecycle and can be deleted. Partnering with a provider for ongoing managed IT services can provide the continuous monitoring and expertise needed to keep your program on track and secure.
A robust monitoring strategy is essential for detecting policy violations or potential threats in real-time. This is where advanced cybersecurity solutions, like Managed Detection and Response (MDR), become invaluable. They provide the visibility and rapid response capabilities needed to enforce your IG policies and protect your data assets around the clock. By continuously refining your approach based on audit findings and threat intelligence, you ensure your governance framework remains a living, effective defense for your organization's most critical information.
Create Clear Information Governance Policies
Establishing policies and procedures for managing and securing your data assets is essential for ensuring your organization remains compliant with legal and regulatory requirements for protecting sensitive data.
Data management policy will help you decide how to collect and store sensitive data. A data security policy will help you decide how to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access and malicious attacks. A data retention policy will help you decide how long to store sensitive data and a data disposal policy will help you decide how to securely destroy sensitive data when it’s no longer needed.
Data security policies and data management policies can help you identify what sensitive data your organization collects, how and why it collects the data, and where it stores the data. They can also help you select tools and technologies for protecting the data and determine the best IG policies and procedures for managing and securing the data.
Define Specific Security Controls
Your information governance policies are the "what" and "why," but your security controls are the "how." Implementing specific, tangible controls is how you translate your strategy into action and protect sensitive data from unauthorized access. These controls are the practical guardrails that enforce your policies day-to-day. This includes establishing role-based access controls to ensure employees only see the data necessary for their jobs, encrypting sensitive data both at rest in your servers and in transit across your network, and conducting regular security audits to identify and patch vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. A robust set of controls is your best defense against breaches, which can erode customer trust and lead to serious financial and legal consequences. Getting these controls right is fundamental to any effective cybersecurity posture.
Establish Rules for Data Deletion
It’s tempting to hold onto data indefinitely, but in reality, old data can become a significant liability. Establishing clear, automated rules for data retention and deletion is a critical part of information governance. Your organization needs a formal schedule that dictates how long to keep different types of records based on legal, regulatory, and business requirements. Once data is no longer needed, you must have a process for disposing of it securely to ensure it cannot be recovered. This practice does more than just help with compliance; it actively reduces your attack surface. By minimizing the amount of data you store, you limit the potential impact of a breach and simplify your overall data management. A strong data deletion policy is a proactive step toward a more secure and efficient IT environment.
Choose the Right Technology
Even the best policies and controls can fall short without the right technology to support and automate them. Selecting the appropriate IT tools is essential for enforcing your information governance framework at scale. Technology can help you manage access controls, monitor for suspicious data usage, and ensure your policies are being followed consistently across the organization. Solutions like Data Loss Prevention (DLP) can prevent sensitive information from leaving your network, while Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems provide critical visibility into activity across your environment. The key is to build an integrated tech stack that works together, rather than a collection of siloed tools. Partnering with an expert can help you navigate the options and implement cloud solutions and security platforms that streamline enforcement and strengthen your governance framework.
Get Your Team on Board with Training
Data security, data management and data retention policies can be complicated. Training your employees on these policies will help ensure they understand the policies and are able to follow the IG procedures designed to protect sensitive data.
Additionally, you can use training sessions as an opportunity to remind your employees about the importance of protecting sensitive data. Training your employees will also help you stay compliant with legal and regulatory requirements for protecting sensitive data.
Measuring and Maintaining Your Program
An information governance plan is a great start, but the real work is making it a living part of your organization. A framework that isn't measured or maintained is just a document. To ensure your program is effective, you need a continuous cycle of enforcement, measurement, and refinement. This ongoing process protects your data, reduces risk, and demonstrates the value of your efforts to the business. It transforms governance from a theoretical exercise into a practical discipline that strengthens your security posture and supports strategic goals.
Enforce Policies and Monitor Compliance
A policy without enforcement is merely a suggestion. To give your information governance rules real weight, establish clear consequences for non-compliance before an issue occurs. This creates a culture of accountability where everyone understands their role in protecting company data. You can support this by conducting regular checks to see if employees are following the rules. Consistent monitoring helps identify gaps and take corrective action when necessary. Using advanced cybersecurity tools and services can automate much of this process, providing continuous visibility without over-burdening your internal team.
Define and Track Success Metrics
How do you know if your program is working? You need to decide how you'll measure success from the start. These metrics shouldn't be arbitrary; they must align with your organization's strategic goals and the risks you aim to mitigate. Key performance indicators (KPIs) could include fewer data access violations, the percentage of obsolete data purged, or faster e-discovery response times. Tracking these metrics provides concrete evidence of your program's value, helps justify investment, and allows you to make data-driven decisions to refine your strategy.
Treat Governance as an Ongoing Process
Information governance is not a one-time project. It's an ongoing effort requiring continuous attention as the digital landscape changes with new technologies and regulations. Because of this, you must regularly review your information governance plan to ensure it remains relevant and effective. This cycle of assessment and adaptation is critical for long-term success. Partnering with a managed IT services provider can give you the dedicated expertise needed to stay ahead, ensuring your program evolves with your business and the threats it faces.
When to Get Expert Help with Information Governance
With the right IG practices in place, your company will not only remain compliant with necessary regulations, but also avoid any potential audit failures related to privacy and security concerns.
The data governance specialists at BCS365 can perform a full audit of your business’s data, advise you on information governance policies, procedures and management strategies, and train your users in IG best practices.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn't information governance just another name for cybersecurity? Not quite. Think of it this way: cybersecurity focuses on building a strong defense to protect your data from threats. Information governance is the broader strategy that defines what data is worth protecting, why you're keeping it, who should have access to it, and when it should be deleted. Your governance plan provides the rules, and your cybersecurity measures help enforce them.
This seems like a massive undertaking. What is the single most important first step? The most critical first step is to understand exactly what data you have. Before you can create policies or implement controls, you need a clear map of your information landscape. This means conducting a thorough audit to find out what data you store, where it lives (including old archives and cloud storage), and who uses it. This foundational clarity makes every other part of the process more focused and effective.
What's the difference between a data steward and the IT department? The IT department manages the infrastructure, systems, and tools that store and secure your data. A data steward, on the other hand, is a business leader who takes ownership of a specific set of data. For example, the head of HR might be the steward for employee records. They are responsible for the data's quality, accuracy, and usage policies because they understand its business context best. They work with IT, but their focus is on the information itself, not the technology behind it.
My team is already at capacity. How can we realistically implement and maintain a governance program? You don't have to do everything at once. Start by prioritizing your most sensitive and high-risk data. Implementing the right technology can also automate many of the monitoring and enforcement tasks, which reduces the manual burden on your team. Many companies also find success by working with a partner who can provide the specialized expertise to build the framework and manage its ongoing maintenance, freeing up your internal team to focus on their core responsibilities.
How can we tell if our information governance plan is actually successful? Success is measured by real-world improvements. You can track key metrics like a reduction in data access violations, lower storage costs from defensible deletion, or faster response times for legal and compliance requests. A less formal but equally important sign of success is when your teams report that they can find accurate, trustworthy information more quickly, allowing them to make better decisions without wasting time.
Key Takeaways
- Assemble a cross-functional team for practical policies: Information governance isn't just an IT or legal task. Involving leaders from across the business ensures your rules are effective, practical, and supported by the entire organization.
- Map your data to manage your risk: You cannot protect what you don't know you have. A complete data audit reveals where sensitive information lives and who can access it, forming the essential foundation for all your security and retention policies.
- Treat governance as a continuous program, not a one-time project: A successful strategy requires ongoing effort. Regularly monitor compliance, train employees, and refine your policies to adapt to new technologies and threats, ensuring your data remains secure over time.
