Data governance is an essential part of any business process. It helps companies effectively manage their data and ensure it is being used appropriately with the right security processes in place.
Through data governance, your business is more secure in its compliance with policies and data security. Gartner predicted that 60% of businesses with proper cloud data governance would experience 33% fewer security lapses by the end of 2021.
What is data governance?
Data governance is the process of managing data and its usage to provide transparency, accountability and control. It includes a set of best practices that govern how data is collected, stored, shared, used and protected.
Data governance has become more important in recent years due to the ever-increasing volumes of data generated by organizations. It helps businesses in their decision-making processes by providing valuable insights in an organized manner, and increases efficiency by reducing errors in your database.
Data governance benefits:
Why do you need a data governance strategy?
The goal of a data governance strategy is to ensure your business is compliant with laws and regulations, privacy, security and other organizational requirements.
Data governance strategies can be used to manage data from different sources across an organization. The strategy also helps in creating a consistent approach for all divisions within the company.
For example, without effective data governance, customer names could be listed differently in different systems in the company. These inconsistencies can lead to failed transactions and lost revenue.
Crucially, data governance ensures your business is not violating privacy laws or disclosing personal information without your customers' consent. It provides a clear standard and set of rules for how sensitive information needs to be handled, greatly reducing the possibility of accidental data leaks.
Ensuring regulatory compliance
Data governance is crucial to ensure regulatory compliance. In order for a company to meet the standards of the law, it must have a data governance system in place that meets the requirements of governmental regulations like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Data governance can help organizations to identify risks and opportunities by providing a clear understanding of the data they hold. It also ensures there are proper security protocols in place for company systems and devices as well as for third-party vendors.
There are many different types of data that need to be managed in a business, including personal data, financial information, medical records and intellectual property.
Ensuring your data is stored securely, shared only when needed, and used appropriately will greatly reduce any internal errors that could land you in legal trouble.
Creating a data governance framework
In order to protect sensitive information from being leaked or stolen, businesses need to implement an effective data governance framework that can prevent breaches and protect their reputation.
The framework is a set of policies and procedures that help an organization manage its data. It is the process of understanding what data needs to be collected, stored, managed, shared and protected.
A data governance framework will help companies by:
Data governance in the cloud
The digital age has brought about a new era of content production and consumption. With the increase in data generation, storage and distribution, it is imperative to create a data governance plan that will help in the migration of content to the cloud.
In order for an organization's cloud migration to be successful, it needs a solid data governance strategy that includes an understanding of its current organizational structure, business processes and business requirements.
Cloud data governance can help your business implement better compliance and security practices as you can easily move data from one cloud provider to another. Cloud data governance also allows you to use multiple tools across different clouds without worrying about compatibility issues.
Talk to the experts
Implementing data governance in your business is crucial to increase your security, compliance and data analysis.
The data governance specialists at BCS365 have all the expertise required to help you implement the processes your business needs to keep its critical data secure. Talk to them today and start addressing the gaps in your data security.