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Proper data governance for business

Regina Pazvakavambwa
By Regina Pazvakavambwa, ITWeb portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 20 Apr 2015
Organisations need a data governance strategy that applies the same business rules and standards across the organisation.
Organisations need a data governance strategy that applies the same business rules and standards across the organisation.

Businesses often struggle to manage the evolution of data, and more data sources becoming available.

This is according to Antionette van Zyl, senior solution manager: data management at SAS, who notes proper data management starts with a solid understanding of data governance.

Organisations need a data governance strategy that applies the same business rules and standards across the organisation, creating a central business rules repository that can govern data within any application or database, says Van Zyl.

She believes managing data as an asset means establishing rules and policies for data so that investment, technology, and staffing decisions can be optimised around the data - ultimately, if done right, it can save costs and prevent over-investment.

According to Van Zyl, the key to ongoing data governance success is to continually measure, refine and monitor the process -also reporting issues or risks.

"Data governance processes should be absorbed into the software development lifecycle so that it forms part of all going forward. Without data that is consistent, accurate and reliable across the enterprise, an organisation can easily reach misleading, faulty and potentially harmful conclusions."

Effective data governance practices require support from executive management if they are to be successful. However, many CEOs do not link data to business value, believing that data is an IT issue, while IT believes it merely supplies the data to the organisation, says Van Zyl.

Heino Gevers, customer success manager at Mimecast, says with cyber crime being at an all-time high, high-profile businesses across the globe are falling prey to phishing and spear-phishing attacks.

Therefore, companies should take more extreme measures to protect data and adhere to data governance requirements.

Businesses should do their due diligence in terms of understanding the data governance requirements of their industry and the platforms available to store information, says Gevers.

He points out organisations need to find a solution that allows them to eliminate the fragmentation of data within their organisation and consolidate all structured and unstructured data onto a single platform.

In addition, they need to implement the required data classification processing and retention measures needed to comply with the data governance policies relevant to their organisation.

Historically South African businesses did not consider data governance as an important investment but with the introduction of new legislation like POPI - where organisations have much at stake (reputational damage and hefty fines) - businesses are starting to introduce task teams to implement data classification, retention and processing measures, says Gevers.

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