The implementation of data governance plays an important role in ensuring that the data owned by the company can be used optimally without sacrificing its security and integrity. Without the right governance system, unorganized data can cause inconsistencies in business decisions and pose a risk of regulatory violations.
In addition, with increasingly stringent regulations related to data protection, such as GDPR or the Personal Data Protection Act, companies are required to have clear policies regarding how data is collected, stored, and shared. The implementation of strong data governance is not only fulfilling legal obligations but also building the trust of customers and business partners. This article will explain in detail what data governance is, its benefits, and challenges during implementation.
What is Data Governance?
Data governance is a framework that includes policies, procedures, and standards for effectively managing data within an organization. It includes setting up responsibilities, rules, and processes to ensure that the data available is of high quality, relevant, secure, easily accessible, and meets policy standards.
Data governance acts by ensuring that data is verified through a secure path to endpoints and users. This can help businesses protect and manage large amounts of data by improving data quality, reducing data silos, ensuring compliance with rules and security, and distributing data access appropriately.
Data governance is a solution that has emerged along with the increasing implementation of AI, IoT, Big Data and digital transformation by businesses.
Benefits of Data Governance
In addition to improving an organization’s Business Intelligence (BI) efforts, data governance has several benefits:
- Consistent data quality to ensure accuracy, completeness, and relevance in making business decisions.
- Reduce the risk of data breaches by establishing the right data access controls.
- Comply with legal standards such as the PDP Law, GDPR, and HIPAA.
- Improve operational efficiency by minimizing data duplication and increasing productivity through organized data.
Elements of Data Governance
To ensure that data governance runs well for organizations, there are a number of important elements that must be considered.
- Define who plays a role and is responsible for each type of data.
- Establish policies and procedures for how data is collected, stored, and used.
- Perform validation and correction to maintain data quality consistency.
- Use tools to identify, organize, and monitor data.
Data Governance vs Data Management
Data governance and data management are two interconnected concepts in data management, but they have different focuses, goals, and scopes. In detail, here are the differences between the two.
| Aspects | Data Governance | Data Management |
| Definition | One of the subsets of data management that focuses on managing frameworks, policies, procedures, and standards to ensure data is managed correctly. | Comprehensive practices for collecting, processing, storing, processing, and using data securely and efficiently. |
| Purpose | Ensuring data quality, consistency, security, and regulatory compliance. | Support strategic decision-making and improve business outcomes. |
| Activities | 1. Establish rules related to data access, use, and management. 2. Ensure data complies with legal and industry standards, such as personal data protection (PDP Law). 3. Continuously supervise and audit data quality. | 1. Data collection from various sources. 2. Manage the infrastructure to store data. 3. Compile and process data into valuable information. 4. Protect data from security threats and privacy breaches. |
| Data Integration | The team identified patterns and similarities in the separate data collection. | The team designs a data model and architecture to integrate the dataset. |
| Data access | Establish access policies, such as rules for sensitive data. | Implement these policies, for example through the role-based access control (RBAC) mechanism. |
| Focus and perspective | Data control and arrangement to ensure data accuracy, reliability, and integrity. | Technical operations and data infrastructure to ensure data can be used efficiently and securely. |
Advantages of Data Governance
Data governance provides a strategic foundation for organizations to manage data as a high-value asset. With a modern and collaborative approach, businesses can leverage data to drive innovation, maintain security, and create business value in a sustainable manner. Here are six benefits of data governance for businesses:
- Ensure consistency and accuracy of data according to standards so that it can increase trust in data.
- Protect data from external and internal threats by integrating modern security standards such as a Zero Trust approach, while ensuring regulatory compliance.
- Management is more flexible and collaborative through the application of data mesh and data fabric to facilitate data access and management.
- Access to relevant data is easier, so business teams can drive innovation and respond to market needs faster.
- Improve the user experience by ensuring that data is not only organized, but also easy to use internally.
- Enable operational efficiency and scalability without the need to rebuild data infrastructure, to meet growing data demands and not overburden IT teams.
Challenges of Data Governance
In practice, data governance can trigger a number of challenges for organizations. Here are the five challenges in question.
- Lack of support from the executive level regarding oversight and accountability enforcement between data teams and individual contractors related to data governance policy awareness.
- Data architecture and tools are inconsistent, so many organizations have difficulty implementing effective data governance.
- Data visibility and control due to the distribution of data in different formats, locations, and storage types such as data lake houses or data warehouses that make it difficult to monitor data flows and their use.
- The trend of self-service analytics and business intelligence adds to the pressure as more and more users request access to data quickly. Meanwhile, the governance team needs to balance the speed and tight streaming data system to prevent data leaks.
- AI implementations require more complex data without exposing sensitive data such as company secrets or personal information.
Data Governance Best Practices
As a framework for managing and protecting data, here is a guide to best practices for data governance implementation for you.
- Create a data governance plan that includes business objectives, data governance, and organizational structure. Prioritize cross-system data integration for better business decisions.
- Automate data governance policies, standards, and processes to ensure consistency.
- Monitor data accuracy, completeness, and consistency to ensure the quality and relevance of the data used in accordance with strategic and operational needs.
- Ensure data governance complies with laws such as data privacy, retention, and auditing as per local laws or regulations.
- Commitment to continuous improvement, including updating policies, technology, and employee training because data governance is not a one-time step.
- In addition to compliance, data governance can also improve operational efficiency, customer experience, and encourage product innovation.
Data Governance Solution Recommendations from CDT
We at Central Data Technology (CDT) are committed to helping businesses optimally protect and manage data to reduce the risk of breaches and drive business innovation. With our advanced solutions, you can design and implement an effective data governance strategy to adapt to rapid business changes. Take a deeper look at three recommendations for data governance solutions from CDT.
AWS Lake Formation
AWS Lake Formation is a solution designed to help you build a data lake quickly and securely. Gain the ease of centrally managing metadata and data permissions with fine-grained access control to ensure that users can only access relevant and on-demand data.
Lake Formation allows you to manage data access permissions easily, efficiently and centrally to reduce errors. In addition, the solution is designed for the management needs of thousands of users and ever-growing data sets without sacrificing performance.
With Lake Formation, we gain deeper data insights for more informed decision-making. AWS also offers easy access monitoring and data compliance in accordance with applicable regulations. The trail audit feature helps you keep track of who, when, and with whom data is accessed.
Four key features of AWS Lake Formation:
- Centralize data permissions: all permissions and access controls are centrally managed in one place to minimize complexity.
- Simplify security management and governance: structured data governance arrangements for consistent implementation of data security policies.
- Understand and share data: better understanding of data and securely different between teams to improve visibility and collaboration.
- Access data monitoring: access and compliance monitoring to ensure that data access policies are adhered to and prepare for regulatory audits.
Hitachi Vantara Data Governance Solutions
Hitachi Vantara provides data governance solutions to intelligently manage data so that it can comply with regulations, maintain data quality, and security, and gain actionable insights. This solution makes it easier for companies to comply with regulations, while automating compliance so as to minimize legal risks.
Hitachi Vantara ensures that data is managed to have a high level of accuracy, consistency, and alignment so that data quality and integrity are guaranteed. Structured data management, collaboration and work accountability accelerate operations and increase efficiency.
A well-defined and accurate data framework enables better decision-making in real-time. This solution protects sensitive data from unauthorized access and data corruption without sacrificing business continuity.
To ensure data security and reduce operational costs, here are the outstanding features of Hitachi Vantara’s data governance:
- Data classification and standardization: helps classify and standardize data for more efficient management and ease of search.
- Master Data Management (MDM): provides a framework for centrally and consistently managing key data.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP): protects data from leaks or unauthorized access, keeping critical company data confidential.
- Integrated Data Controls: more structured management of data access and permissions to improve security and operational efficiency.
- Scalable and secure architecture: designed for scale to support data growth without sacrificing performance or security.
Okta Identity Governance
Okta Identity Governance is a modern data governance solution to help organizations efficiently and effectively protect, manage, and audit access to critical resources. Okta enables enterprises to securely and effectively manage access to critical applications, data, and resources.
This solution helps businesses mitigate the risk of unauthorized access to avoid abuse and only users with permission to access resources. With advanced management tools, IT teams can reduce operational burden, and companies increase employee productivity through automation systems and intuitive UIs.
For better security, Okta Identity Governance comes with several excellent features:
- Discover user and permission across your stack: end-to-end visibility to identify who has access to what, ensuring access management and security gaps.
- Enforce least privilege with least friction: Okta allows companies to implement Role-based access control (RBAC) to ensure only users have the access they absolutely need.
- Empower decision makers: features interactive dashboards and reports to provide in-depth insights to make fast, data-driven decisions.
- Optimize costs and simplify orchestration: integrate identity management and direct access to other systems, reducing the need for additional solutions.
- Uncomplicate compliance: automation features to ensure organizations stay compliant with regulatory standards with complete audits and real-time compliance reports.
Read More: Why Every Company Needs Business Analytics to Accelerate Business?
Get Data Governance Solutions at CDT
Central Data Technology (CDT), as your company’s strategic partner, is ready to help build a robust data governance strategy against changes in the dynamic business environment. With deep experience and a strong understanding of leading data governance solutions such as AWS, Hitachi Vantara, and Okta, CDT is ready to support you in ensuring that the data available is secure and of high quality.
As part of CTI Group, we are committed to supporting you from the consultation stage, implementation, to after-sales support. Contact the CDT team by clicking this link to find the right data governance solution for your business needs.
Author: Ervina Anggraini – Content Writer CTI Group
