Data is one of the critical assets for any business. With increased internet usage and enhanced digital transformations, companies need to manage Big Data. So, businesses require efficient data governance and secure sensitive data to ensure users’ trust. This is why it is essential to have efficient data governance and security policies in place for your organization. Data governance policy not only improves security but also helps businesses manage data through its complete lifecycle, from the acquired information to its disposal.
Strategic business decisions require high-quality data. In addition, senior managers and team leads can use data to enhance operations. So, securing, managing, and maintaining data quality becomes vital for your business. Data governance helps in ensuring that information quality remains consistent and data is secure. This is where companies stand apart from the competition. Let’s understand how you can leverage a data governance security framework.
What is Data Security Governance?
Data security governance is a framework for ensuring acceptable data protection and privacy levels across an organization. It includes policies, procedures, and controls to help ensure that data is securely processed, accessed only by authorized personnel, and disposed of under applicable laws and regulations. Data security governance has four key components:
- Data Protection Strategy – This document establishes an organization’s overall data protection goals and objectives. In addition, it should identify Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that is subject to protection and any other sensitive information requiring special attention.
- Security Policies and Procedures – These documents outline how data will be protected from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. They include procedures for authentication of users, authorization of user privileges, system activity monitoring, and reporting of suspected incidents.
- Control Systems– These systems (i.e., firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and data encryption) regulate access to information and resources, monitor system activity for signs of suspicious behavior, and report any incidents to management.
- Training and Awareness – Management must be informed of the importance of data security to ensure that employees are fully aware of the policies and procedures governing data protection. Employees should also be trained to protect their sensitive information using appropriate hygiene processes (e.g., password management).
Why is Data Security Governance Important?
Organizations must accumulate, analyze, process, and manage massive amounts of data to improve user experience. One way to manage data quality and ensure security is to have enhanced governance policies.
It helps businesses secure user information. Further, data governance helps enterprises comply with major data regulations like GDPR. The most significant benefit is the differentiation between your business and others in the market. It provides a competitive advantage for your brand with improved user trust.
You can implement these essential elements of the data governance security framework:
- Data Classification – You need to know where your data comes from, the type, where it will be stored, and for what period. Data classification helps answer all the information storage, source, and retention time questions.
- Governance policies – You must define data governance policies. First, it helps in improving data security and privacy through the definition of access. In other words, the policy will determine how data will be accessed, by whom, for what purposes, etc.
- Data lifecycle management – You must have policies to manage data from collection, storage, processing, retrieval, and disposal. It ensures high-quality information, maintaining data governance security and compliance.
- Data governance security and privacy – You need a reliable database architecture to ensure higher security and privacy. Cloud infrastructure requires effective IAM systems for enhanced data security.
Maintaining enhanced security at on-premise infrastructure has limits. This is where cloud-enabled infrastructure can help you with better security features and data governance policies.
How Does the Cloud Enable Innovation in Data Governance?
The cloud enables innovation, which helps organizations to move their data quickly and securely from one place to another. This mobility makes it easier for organizations to access and share their data with other organizations. It also helps organizations keep track of changes made to their data, which can help them make more informed decisions about managing that information.
Apart from mobility advantage, some of the key benefits that the cloud offers to enterprises for data governance and security are the following:
Enhanced IAM
Identity and access management (IAM) is an essential aspect of data governance. It allows organizations to ensure data access is restricted to persons with proper authorization. Apart from the authorization, it also ensures that roles are defined for data access. Cloud service providers like AWS, Google, and Azure provide IAM features.
Better data protection
Cloud-based innovations have ensured that data protection is better than on-premise infrastructure through enhanced monitoring. You can integrate security monitoring solutions easily with your apps powered by the cloud to monitor systems.
Optimal security intelligence
Cloud helps businesses to analyze, secure and protect systems against cyberattacks through enhanced security intelligence. You can integrate cloud intelligence engines to optimize the monitoring, logging, and tracing of important operational events. Your systems will also have better resilience to cyberattacks through integrations and malicious injections.
Conclusion
Your product is not enough to attract users, as they need to have a sense of security. Cloud-native data security policies help you achieve better trust among users by maintaining information privacy. Data governance security will require a well-planned data security framework and advanced event analytics to ensure better observability. Cloudlytics can help you with advanced cloud intelligence, event analytics, and data governance policies for better business differentiation.
