Data governance requires understanding your data, how it’s created and used, and who is accessing it. Given the large volumes of data handled by almost every organization, using tools to help track and manage your data about data is essential to an effective data governance process.
Because the scope of data governance is so broad, covering everything from metadata and data dictionaries to data protection, there are many different types of software that address the needs of data governance. Before beginning a software selection process, understand what your priorities are, whether managing data or managing the data governance process. Then look for software with the features to address those concerns. You may need features including:
- Identifying data ownership. Data governance teams make sure data is handled properly, but they don’t own the data. Keeping track of ownership is vital to understanding who has the responsibility for ensuring data integrity and security.
- Implementing and tracking data quality. Automation of rules that ensure data quality and tracking relevant data quality metrics make it easier to achieve high levels of quality.
- Automating data management workflow and policies. Ensure data discovery, data archiving, and data deletion follow consistent workflows with all necessary approvals by using tools that automate your data management rules and procedures, including archiving and deletion of obsolete data. Automation can help you track and manage issue resolution. Automation can also ensure that policies are created as well as applied through a standard process.
- Manage metadata. Software can help you create and manage your data model and business glossary and let you create custom attributes for describing data. Software can also help you create and manage data validation and enrichment rules.
- Track data usage. Software can create an audit trail for data creation, data reads, and data deletion, along with the ability to search the trail and identify unexpected patterns of usage. The same type of audit trail should be available for all metadata and data rules, as well.
Your data governance software should be able to cope with the wide variety of data sources in use today, including traditional databases and spreadsheets, as well as emails, instant messages, video and audio files, and other untraditional, unstructured content.
Because of the broad scope of data governance, choosing software that matches your requirements can be complex. dcVAST provides support for the Veritas suite of products, including Enterprise Vault and Data Insight. Taken together, these tools allow you to monitor data as it’s created and then classify and archive it consistently. Contact us to learn how to use these tools to provide a strong foundation for your data governance efforts.
