Your Guide to
Data Governance
David Linthicum
As companies increasingly turn to data to influence
their decisions, it is critical that data owners under-
stand the rapidly evolving needs of risk management
for data that crosses applications, on-premise facili-
ties and clouds.
Successful data governance can be achieved with
applications that span private on-premise environ-
ments and public cloud resources, but governance
must be a fundamental part of the design and imple-
mentation, not an after thought.
Key Components of a Complete Data
Governance Strategy
Value
Know what value the data holds in terms of cost if
lost, cost of generation and value derived through
analysis. These metrics will be used to determine
safeguards for protecting the data and relative costs
for storing the data on different platforms.
Location
Know both where the data is created and where it is
stored. This information leads to what safeguards are
needed to protect the data at rest as well as in transit.
This metric also helps determine the best methods
for moving data between sites for analysis, transfor-
mation, and integration.
Risk
Knowing what risk the data poses to your organization
is key to ensuring it is appropriately protected. High-
risk data includes social security numbers, addresses,
and credit card information, all of which require alert-
ing customers if they are lost or compromised.
Decision Makers
Every organization has varying levels of individuals that
are accessing data in different ways. A solid data gover-
nance strategy will include an inventory of these deci-
sions makers; including what data they require access
to, on what time frames and with what tools. This
enables the organization to properly plan how to enable
these users, while managing the associated risk.
Accuracy
Data, and the decisions derived from it present them-
selves in many ways, including completeness, non-ob-
solescence, precision and repeatability. It is critical
that all data sets have an associated set of policies
about the quality of the data that drives the organiza-
tion to properly clean incoming data, and properly
gauge the accuracy of results derived from that data.
Best Practices in a Cloud-First World
Keep security context with the data as it moves
between systems
By keeping security context with a data set, it ensures
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