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A guide to finding the happy balance between enough governance to tame data chaos and enough self-service to empower stakeholders.

Effective data governance builds a culture of trust and collaboration around data.

Data governance frameworks play a critical role in helping organizations use their data assets to their fullest potential. They provide direction and structure for how an organization can collect, store, and utilize data while ensuring compliance with laws and regulations.

Data governance is the process of managing and protecting data throughout its lifecycle. It involves establishing policies, procedures, and standards for how data is collected, stored, used, and shared. This requires systems that are complex to be put in place by several stakeholders across the organization. Many organizations look at selecting the right software to implement a framework.

A good data governance strategy should benefit all users of your organization’s data—not just those with technical responsibility for it. Recent years have seen the increasing importance of data as a strategic asset, as several companies have used it to unlock and create value. Increasingly, companies are turning to data governance programs as a foundational pillar of their data strategy (like data mesh) to improve their data sets’ quality, consistency, usability, and security.

According to IDCs Global Datasphere, 64.2 ZB of data was created in 2020 alone. This number is projected to grow by 23% annually from 2020-2025. Therefore, we need data governance frameworks for efficient data management and control. This will help us extract maximum value out of such high volumes of data. Such frameworks would be required for data integrity, data protection, and data security. Indeed, according to BDO, the average data breach cost has been estimated to be around USD 3.8 million.

Effective control and governance over your data assets is vital for long-term business success. By keeping your data available, reliable and usable for analysis, consumption and sharing, you can ensure data quality, data security and data reliability is consistently met. However, many organizations today struggle to implement governance frameworks over their data, which has once again highlighted the importance of data governance. So, what is data governance?

Many organizations are still under the impression that data governance can be achieved by implementing a data governance tool. This is false.

While the word “data” has been common since the 1940s, managing data’s growth, current use, and regulation is a relatively new frontier. Governments and enterprises are working hard today to figure out the structures and regulations needed around data collection and use. According to Gartner, by 2023 65% of the world’s population will have their personal data covered under modern privacy regulations.