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.

In a recent blog, Cloudera Chief Technology Officer Ram Venkatesh described the evolution of a data lakehouse, as well as the benefits of using an open data lakehouse, especially the open Cloudera Data Platform (CDP). If you missed it, you can read up about it here.

How can you ensure data quality and security across your data analytics pipeline? With data governance – the exercising of authority and control over your data assets. It includes tracking, maintaining and protecting data at every stage of the lifecycle.

Data governance is a set of rules, processes, role delegations, and responsibilities that clearly define data quality, accessibility, data security, and regulatory compliance for an organization’s enterprise data management. You are most probably already applying some sort of a data governance program - setting up rules for the management of data and acceptable use of data assets.

Having a governance strategy gives you data control and visibility.