There is an ever-increasing alphabet soup of regulations that place controls on how businesses protect and utilize data. The data governance teams that form as a result are an unavoidable cost of doing business in the digital age. Fortunately, data governance isn’t just a negative impact on your company’s books. Implementing effective data governance has positive impacts as well.
Data Quality
Today’s companies are driven by data, and they collect massive amounts of it to feed into analytics programs that produce insights and support marketing, strategy, and product development. Making sure the insights are valid requires that the data is valid, first. Data governance programs that ensure the meaning of fields is known and that data is protected from corruption is the first step to making sure that business decisions are based on facts rather than flawed data. Garbage in, garbage out remains true today.
Data Protection
The costs of failing to protect data far outweigh the costs of any corporate data governance project. Besides the damage to a company’s reputation in case of a breach or misuse of data, companies face the risk of substantial penalties for failing to protect data. The European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation, taking effect in May 2018, levies penalties of up to 4 percent of global annual turnover for violations. A relatively small investment in data governance can save companies a massive amount of money.
Data Usage
Strong data governance lets you implement self-service functionality that gives your analysts and developers access to the data they need when they need it. With immediate availability of data, analytics produce insights faster and programmers build applications more quickly. Your business is able to respond to opportunities and make better decisions faster.
Achieving Effective Data Governance
Getting the bottom line benefits of strong data governance requires the business to understand the value of its data and the impact of managing and utilizing it more effectively. The data governance team needs to be empowered to implement the necessary controls and the business users and technical teams affected by the rules need to understand the financial reasons for these decisions.
The data governance team also needs to use tools that implement the data governance strategy. Products like Enterprise Vault and Data Insight from Veritas help organizations locate data that needs to be protected, archive it in compliance with regulatory rules, and provide copy data management enabling the business to use it effectively.
With the right tools and strategy, data governance contributes to your business success. dcVAST’s experience with tools from Veritas helps businesses leverage the tools necessary to bring data under control while keeping it available to serve the business. Contact us to learn more about how to turn data governance into a contributor to business success.
