Series 6: Data Governance Frameworks
Data Governance Frameworks: Types And Importance
Modern organizations are required to plan the ways data is used by them, while ensuring that it is consistently handled throughout a business cycle. To improve business performance and deliver the needed outcomes, organizations have to effectively extract value from the diverse data collected and stored, and ensure its security and compliance. Many companies today maintain a risk-based approach towards data security, which largely focuses on data governance.
1. What is meant by data governance?
In simple terms, data governance can be defined as the capacity within a firm to aid in providing for, as well as protecting high-quality data during its lifecycle. It also involves the aspects of data security, availability, and integrity.
The practice of identifying valuable data across a company, making sure of its quality standards, and ultimately improving its value to the business, is also a part of data governance. On the whole, this practice includes technology, processes and people that aid in the proper handling of data across a business.
The policies of a typical data governance program shall include:
Choosing to delineate accountability to the ones having the responsibility of data and data assets
Delegating responsibilities at proper organizational levels in regards to the protection and management of data
Identifying safeguards to protect data
Offering integrity controls for the assurance of data quality and accuracy
Data Governance Frameworks
Data governance framework essentially is a structure that aids companies to make decisions, assign responsibilities, and take action on enterprise data. These frameworks can be classified into three broad types:
Command and control: The data governance responsibilities are assigned to certain company employees under this framework, who can be considered to be a type of data stewards.
Traditional: A greater number of employees are assigned the role of data steward under this framework on a voluntary basis, while also having a set of employees as “critical data stewards” with additional responsibilities.
Non-invasive: Under this framework, people are identified as data stewards on the basis of their existing work and relation to data. Everyone who creates and modifies data becomes a data steward for that data.
Funding and management support: Until and unless a data governance framework is backed by the c ompany management as an official policy, it cannot be meaningful.
User engagement: it should be made sure that everyone consuming data have a proper understanding of it, and also cooperates with data governance rules.
Data governance and cyber security
All organizations must have an accurate idea about what data to protect and how to do so, to reduce the risks caused. Data or information protection is right at the center of security, but one cannot protect it unless they are accurately aware of what data they have, where it is stored, with whom is it shared and how is it used.
Proper data management and governance are needed to implement the needed cyber security measures. Business data must be managed in a responsible, law-abiding and structured manner, so that it becomes simpler for the security technicians to ensure its optimal protection.
Importance of data governance
Data is gradually becoming an important corporate asset that plays an instrumental role in determining the success of any business. Digital transformation can be witnessed in diverse segments of the contemporary corporate world. However, a business can only exploit their data effectively for a successful digital transformation only if they can govern their data.
This makes it important to deploy a data governance framework that effectively fits an organization, as well as its future business models and objectives.
The framework must also adequately control the data standards required in this journey, while delegating the important roles and responsibilities within a company, and in relation to the business ecosystem.
Companies today can support their data governance efforts through new-age tools like Azure Purview. This basically is a unified data governance that allows people to manage and govern their multi-cloud, on-premises, as well as SaaS data with ease.
With the help of this tool, one can develop a holistic, up-to-date map of their data landscape with end-to-end data lineage, sensitive data classification and automated data discovery. Azure Purview especially quite helpful in enabling people to get accurate insight into the location and movement of sensitive data across the hybrid data landscape
A well-defined and managed data governance framework shall underpin the business transformation of a business toward operating on an online platform at several levels within a company.
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