Is it possible to manage a successful business or organization if you’re not successfully managing your data?
Data management in business can be perceived as both an essential task and an annoying nuisance. The fact is that if your organization deals with data of any kind, you need a system in place that helps ensure quality management of that data — from making it useful and accessible to ensuring that it’s secure and compliant with all relevant regulations.
Here’s everything you need to know about what makes an effective data management framework essential, including its core components and how to implement one in your organization.
Why a Data Management Framework Matters
While data management is becoming increasingly critical to organizational success, we often hear from data teams that they have a hard time implementing and using the necessary tools due to the many different systems in place. If you haven’t yet implemented a framework for managing all of your data sources and ensuring that those tools are being used effectively across teams, you’ll find that you spend more time, energy, and resources working for your data, rather than making your data work for you.
Companies today deal with larger amounts of information than ever before. This requires new strategies for containing, controlling, securing, and making use of all this diverse data. Therefore, today’s data management frameworks need to be both more complex and more effective than ever.
Components of a Data Management Framework
An effective data management framework must be robust enough to satisfy an organization’s needs, including data collection, analysis, and security. The following components are considered essential for any complete framework:
Data Access Control
Data access control is a key component of any successful data management framework. At its core, it provides control over who can access data when, and for what purpose. Implementing comprehensive policies across all users, applications, and data sets is essential for protecting against dangers such as security breaches, malicious misuse of sensitive information, and compliance violations.
Metadata Management
Metadata can be described as the data about your data, ranging from its creation date to its location and other details. It can be used to understand the who, what, when, where, and why of the data described. Managing a metadata library allows for the collection, storage and easy access of metadata for all of the different types of data sets in your system — both relational (i.e., flat files) and non-relational (Hadoop).
A quality metadata management tool gives you a place to store and organize all your data in one location, making it searchable by any team member who requires access. Metadata management also allows users to easily add information about their data, including where they got it, when they acquired it, and why. This allows full documentation to be accessible across teams (and not buried inside an email).
Data Provisioning
Data provisioning is the process of making data available to applications where it is needed. This allows you to create relationships between data sets, users, and applications, removing the hassle of having to do this work manually or via spreadsheets that are difficult to manage over time.
Benefits of data provisioning include providing self-service access to data for business users, allowing for access to the information and insights they need without lengthy wait times, and permitting teams to work more efficiently by providing a place to store their data sets where applications can easily find them.
Cloud Compatibility
Cloud compatibility provides the capability to take advantage of cloud services without having to give up control over your data. Universal cloud accessibility gives users seamless access to their data from anywhere, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
Other cloud compatibility benefits include the capacity to deploy services on-premises or in the cloud, with support for both public and private cloud providers — making it easy to choose a solution that fits your budget and business needs. Another benefit is the ability to work seamlessly across SaaS apps like Salesforce and Microsoft Office 365, so you don’t have to worry about data being trapped inside your company’s applications.
Policy Enforcement & Auditing
It’s important to incorporate a data management framework that allows for the enforcement of policies dictating who can see, edit, or share information in your data environment, without requiring users to log into multiple apps. Policy enforcement and auditing capabilities empower users to build a data sharing policy right into their data management environment. This ensures that only those with access to a particular data set can see it, and creates a clear digital audit trail in case policies are not being followed.
Masking & Anonymization
Data masking and anonymization are methods for disguising or removing personal identifiers from data sets. This is done in order to protect sensitive information while preserving the data’s utility. These processes involve removing specific fields or replacing numeric values with masked data — protecting the integrity of your company’s intellectual property while also complying with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA.
While anonymization removes all personally identifiable information (PII) from a data set, masking entails hiding certain fields or replacing them with placeholder values. Data masking and anonymization capabilities can allow users to create data sets where specific fields, like credit card numbers and Social Security numbers, can be encrypted while the rest of the information remains fully functional for downstream processes.This approach protects sensitive information, while keeping the rest of your data available to be leveraged for business purposes without any disruption or downtime.
Implementing a Data Management Framework
Through a solid combination of the components listed above, data-driven organizations can begin to more successfully manage their data, leveraging it for greater insights and results.
For customers seeking a robust data access control platform that strengthens these essential capabilities, look no further than Immuta. Our platform provides users with capabilities like sensitive data discovery, dynamic data masking, and more to enable better data management and help your organization avoid common pitfalls that can negatively impact security, efficiency, and data efficacy.
For more information on why Immuta can be a powerful asset for your company’s data access management needs, schedule a demo today.
