By 2025, experts anticipate that there will be around 175 zettabytes of data in the world, up from only 44 zettabytes in 2022. While those numbers are incomprehensibly large (a zettabyte is the equivalent of a trillion gigabytes), they help demonstrate that there’s an enormous and rapidly growing amount of data in the world. For modern businesses, having robust data governance frameworks in place to help wrangle all of that data is imperative.
Data governance refers to the policies and procedures that organizations create to manage the accuracy and integrity of their data. This is distinct from data management, which is how organizations choose to enact those policies and procedures. As more people access more data across more systems, organizations need to know what data they have, where it’s stored, and how it’s being utilized. Having a data governance framework is essential to ensure that data is consistent, trustworthy, and being used appropriately while also remaining compliant with regulatory requirements.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the importance of data governance frameworks, why organizations need them, and best practices for building them.
What Are Data Governance Frameworks?
A complete data governance framework sets forth the rules of engagement that an organization must follow with regard to its data. That includes articulating:
- The policies and procedures that dictate how an organization will collect, store, protect, and analyze its data.
- Who has access to the data and what their individual roles and responsibilities are.
- How the data will be structured, what its intended use will be, and what technology will be used to manage it.
- Which compliance requirements, laws, and regulations will apply to the data.
- Standards for everything from maintaining data quality and security to promoting data collaboration and literacy.
Simply put, a data governance framework should outline the steps an organization needs to take to ensure that its data remains accessible, trustworthy, secure, compliant, and confidential.
Why Are Data Governance Frameworks Important?
The more data and users that an organization has, the more variation there will be regarding how, when, and why data is accessed. Having an effective data governance framework is essential because it allows organizations to manage all of these variables while remaining compliant with strict regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA. Ultimately, Preventive controls proactively define who can access what data, at what time, and for what purpose. Implementing dynamic access controls helps prevent unauthorized access and use before they can happen.
Finally, it’s important to determine how the effectiveness of a data governance framework will be monitored and reviewed. This includes periodically revisiting and updating the framework as necessary to accommodate new use cases, regulatory requirements, and user needs.
Tips for Creating Effective Data Governance Frameworks
When building your organization’s data governance framework, it’s important to keep several tips in mind. First, it’s a good idea to measure your organization’s overall data maturity to help you better understand your data capabilities and identify vulnerabilities, while also pinpointing where employees require further training. Measuring your current position relative to a privacy maturity assessment framework will allow you to score elements of your business across organizational design and governance, operations, and culture, giving you a baseline understanding of where things stand.
Next, be sure to align all of the relevant stakeholders from across the business, including data engineers and architects, data owners, IT staff, analysts, your chief data officer, any compliance or privacy officers, and internal auditors. Ensuring their alignment around a single, feasible initial use case will be imperative to the success of your framework.
Finally, identify a platform that helps streamline data governance framework implementation, both from the top down and the bottom up. With Immuta, governance frameworks benefit from automated sensitive data discovery and classification; flexible, attribute- and purpose-based access controls; and policies that are written in plain language so anyone can manage and understand them. Immuta also enables dynamic policy enforcement that’s separated from compute platforms and can be consistently enforced across them, as well as on-demand auditing and reporting so you can see who is accessing data, when, and for what purpose.
To see how Immuta’s policy authoring can streamline your governance framework, try our self-guided walkthrough demos with Databricks and Snowflake!
