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Protect While Generating Business Value

Protect While Generating Business Value

Senior Director, Data, Analytics & AI at Microsoft, representing the LatinX leaders in Tech.

Whether an organization is large or small, private or public, many chief data officers (CDOs) are dealing with the exponential growth of their data. Based on my experience working with leading enterprises in Latin America, the investment in advanced analytics increased by 22% in less than a year. The amount of stored customer data in Microsoft Azure and the variety of the data has also doubled in the last three years.

IT leaders are handling this complexity while working to meet existing regulatory requirements, facilitating access to data and delivering value from that data. To address an organization’s needs related to operational databases, big data, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), a seamless data platform can empower organizations to invest more time in creating value through business agility and innovation.

However, to deliver on the promise of data value to the business, CDOs must collaborate with chief information security officers (CISOs) to ensure the organization also manages the risk of data breaches and regulatory compliance. Together, they need to achieve a higher state of security, privacy and compliance across their entire data estate and throughout the data life cycle.

Five Governance Capabilities To Consider

For CDOs and CISOs beginning or continuing their data governance journey, it is worth considering the following five capabilities.

1. Data Visibility

An organization should have the ability to manage the creation and storage of data in any solution and the need to maintain a basic level of metadata. Therefore, it is important to have processes and tools to scan and collect the metadata required to create and maintain a physical inventory of specific data assets.

2. Data Discoverability

A vital part of any data governance strategy is empowering people of the data ecosystem to find and maintain metadata. This includes business glossaries, data dictionaries and data catalogs.

Ensure that a comprehensive inventory is entirely and consistently understood to enable everyone to use the correct data at the right time and for the proper purposes, effectively democratizing the organization’s data.

To reduce efforts, automatically have the capacity to apply metadata using classification rules and data lineage scanning. This will allow experts’ manual input will be required, often as a one-time lift to complete the documentation.

3. Data Security, Access And Use

It’s crucial to cover data-level security controls and monitoring, which rely on access control parts and proper data use. As companies mature, they should also have policies about the ethical use of data as an extension of appropriate use (including principles for a responsible AI).

Using policy management and consumer subscription components can help enable all types of access and use policies to prevent un-authorization or get the desired impacts data can pose.

4. Regulatory Compliance

Many regulations must be enforced at the specific data instance level by default. Data catalogs can help monitor and enforce compliance with regulations such as SOX, GDPR or CCPA in all locations where the data exists.

Try exploring capabilities such as data lineage and relationships between metadata and real assets to enable tracking of controls applicability and enforcement across the organization’s data estate.

5. Master Data Management (MDM)

CDOs should ensure that a single consistent view of the organization’s data is accurate. Having MDM capabilities reduces the variance of operational use of data and ensures consistency in reporting. For this, it can help to consider investing in the standardization of common data models with consistent consumption patterns and curated (and controlled) data sets.

Conclusion

CDOs and CISOs need to be aligned on the vision and mission to achieve the required goals. Although the task is not necessarily easy to complete, the mentioned governance capabilities and tools that automatically discover and classify your data assets across your data estate are critical elements to consider in your strategy.

Digital transformation is built on a data-driven culture and driving business value from data, which requires broader access for more people to data. Here, robust data governance will protect your organization while generating business value.


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