Data Governance: 5 Big Ideas for 2018

It’s 2018, and the data governance strategy that worked for you in the past may no longer be up to par. Fortunately, you can improve it. Here are five strategies for making your data governance strategy even better.

As companies grow, new technologies emerge and new types of data-related challenges appear, the strategy you use to govern your data may need to be updated.

New compliance frameworks may impact your business. You might be collecting data from more sources. And you are probably dealing with more data, because the volume of data that organizations collect tends to increase steadily over time.

As you assess whether your data governance strategy is still sufficient for your needs, consider the following opportunities for improving it.

In a world where data is everywhere, data management is not the responsibility of data engineers alone — or at least, it should not be.

You can streamline your data management processes, while also helping everyone in your organization appreciate the value of data, by striving to turn all of your employees into “citizen data scientists.”

This doesn’t mean that everyone has to become a data engineering expert; instead, it requires educating your employees in the fundamentals of data collection and processing, teaching them why data quality is important and so on.

Multi-cloud computing, which means using multiple public or private clouds at once as part of your IT infrastructure, is a hot topic in the IT world today.

Although multi-cloud computing can apply to any type of workload, consider whether it might help you improve your data management processes in particular. Would spreading your data across multiple clouds help you to increase availability or lower data-management costs? Could it help you improve portability and avoid vendor lock-in?

Compliance rules tend to become more complicated and challenging over time.