The journey to the cloud continues to accelerate. We consistently face an avalanche of data, and the cost and agility benefits that come with the cloud are hard to ignore. Even still, this movement is taking place at a time when evolving privacy regulations and security challenges require companies to institute unprecedented levels of governance. For many organizations, these appear to be conflicting demands, one driven by the need to use more data faster for business initiatives and the other driven by the desire to avoid potential fines and minimize brand damage.
Companies should not have to do one at the expense of the other. Even with these new challenges for data management and governance teams, new strategies and solutions will enable companies to meet both of these goals and derive greater value from their data.
Here are a few trends that are shaping our data landscape:
Companies migrating to the cloud have come to understand that various cloud services, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, offer different pricing structures, features, deployment models, performance trade-offs and more. To take advantage of the right cloud platform for the right workload, more companies are adopting a multicloud approach, which also enables these companies to avoid vendor lock-in while optimizing their costs.
While taking a multicloud approach will be essential for most companies, it will come at the cost of greater management complexity, especially in terms of governance. Solutions are available to help companies develop a unified, comprehensive view of their data infrastructure across multicloud and hybrid deployments, enabling them to apply their governance strategy consistently across this complex universe.
Cloud data lake technologies have matured, and vendors now offer end-to-end solutions that include data integration, transformation and aggregation, as well as machine learning (ML) frameworks, analytics and visualization tools. With the ease and simplicity of “as a service” deployment, cloud-based data lakes offer cost benefits and unlimited, pay-as-you-go scalability.
This trend is driving more enterprises to adopt cloud-based data lakes for critical production workloads. However, doing so only increases security and compliance complexity for data privacy and governance teams, especially when employing a multicloud strategy. Fortunately, cloud data lake vendors recognize the value of solving for this complexity and offer increasing support for regulatory compliance, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Governance solution vendors are also taking advantage of the flexibility of the cloud and the availability of APIs to integrate comprehensive data governance solutions with cloud data lake offerings.
In 2020, we will see more and larger fines related to the GDPR. As the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) goes into effect, 19 other states and over 100 other countries are looking to enact new regulations. As a result, compliance and security teams must take a higher-profile role in ensuring that a data breach or regulatory noncompliance won’t lead to significant fines or damage to the brand. The good news is that companies that embrace privacy compliance and create a culture of privacy by making the necessary people, process and technology changes typically derive significant value from their efforts.
To protect sensitive data and comply with privacy regulations, companies must know what sensitive data exists, where it is and who has access to it. Developing this capability starts with data discovery and visibility. As the demand to beef up data management and governance capabilities increases, we will see many data infrastructure and privacy teams accelerating their privacy compliance journeys by investing in data discovery and auditing solutions that will automatically determine the location of sensitive data across the enterprise, including in the cloud.
