The Role of Data Governance in Ensuring Data Quality and Security

For businesses to uphold optimal integrity, they must adhere to the standards set by Data Governance. Data governance is the regulation of data, to ensure this data is accurate, safe and usable. Having high quality data is essential for businesses to make evidence-based decisions, uphold expected standards, maintain trust with customers and stakeholders, and ensure risk is mitigated. In this article you will learn what data governance is, why it’s important, and why companies within Data and Analytics need data governance solutions.

What Is Data Governance?

When we talk about data governance, we are referring to an umbrella term for the policies and procedures businesses must adhere to to ensure optimal data quality. It involves setting uniform data standards, maintaining data lineage, and implementing mechanisms for data quality control.
Organisations need data governance to avoid inconsistent data silos, ensure compliance with data privacy laws, improve analytics accuracy, prevent data errors, and identify errors.

Compliance with Legal and Regulatory Requirements

It is essential businesses comply with regulatory requirements, not only for the benefit of the business and its reputation, but for the safety and security of its customers and staff.
An example of this compliance is the adherence to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Sticking to these regulations is critical for analytics specialists to avoid legal penalties and uphold the trust of customers and stakeholders. According to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the upper limit for penalties for GDPR breaches is £17.5 million, or 4% of your annual worldwide turnover, highlighting the real risk companies face if not fully compliant.

Data Sharing

Data governance enables collaboration by establishing protocols for sharing and accessing data. This ensures that analytics specialists have the necessary data for their work while adhering to governance policies, maintaining data integrity and security. Having the correct data enables the formation of trustworthy insights which can be confidently presented to stakeholders and relied upon by an organisation.

Data Lifecycle Management

Proper data governance oversees the entire data lifecycle, from acquisition and storage to analysis and disposal. It provides the framework for processes for data retention, archival, and deletion, in line with legal requirements and business needs. Understanding these life cycles is crucial for analysts to comprehend data journeys and ensure it is appropriate to use.

Stakeholder Engagement

Excellent stakeholder engagement is one of the catalysts for a successful data governance. By involving stakeholders in data governance processes, businesses can properly align their business goals with data initiatives. You can expect improved data quality and accuracy, enhanced decision making, risk management, cost efficiency and more credibility when all stakeholders are aware of, and compliant with data governance.

That’s why we take the early stages of research and planning seriously, ensuring all stakeholders are aligned and in agreement before proceeding with any tasks.

Data Governance Technology

Advanced tools exist, and are constantly being upgraded and updated, to ensure data governance is adhered to and managed properly. Metadata management, data quality assessment and data cataloguing are just some of the tools available. An example is Alation, software that uses machine learning to index and reveal a range of data sources including cloud data lakes, relational databases, and file systems. Another example is Oracle, which can harvest and catalogue metadata from any provider. Staying up to date with the latest data and governance technologies can ensure you remain compliant and safe.

Training and Skill Development

Data governance can only be implemented effectively if all staff and stakeholders are equipped with the necessary skills and understanding. Continuous training and skill development is crucial for data and analytics specialists to grasp the importance of data governance and integrate it into their daily processes and tasks.

At Ficode the acquired data from our customers and generated by our internal staff is all stored and processed on our on-premise server and a replica of it is stored on the Cloud such as Microsoft’s OneDrive and Atlassian Bitbucket). Data is then securely shared and collaborated upon, and older data is archived for long-term retention.

Data remains subject to rigorous security and access controls, with regular data backups and disaster recovery mechanisms in place.

To adhere to compliance requirements and data protection regulations, data is purged and deleted from both on-premise servers and the cloud when it reaches the end of its lifecycle.

You can also read more about our Data & Analytics service here.

For more information on data governance solutions and how we can help your business grow successfully, get in touch with us today.