What are the 4 Pillars of Data Governance?

Data is one of the most important components of any organization. This valuable asset can improve operations, influence decision-making, and drive innovation. However, your company’s data won’t be very helpful without an effective data governance framework in place. Data governance ensures that valuable data assets can truly drive business success.

4 pillars of data governance, and each one plays a significant role in ensuring that companies excel at managing data effectively to reduce risks, improve decision-making, and enhance data security.

What are the 4 pillars of data governance? How do they work? them in your data governance initiatives to achieve effective data governance in your organization? We’ve created this detailed guide to help answer all these questions and more.

What is Data Governance?

Data governance involves setting internal standards that ensure your organization’s data is secure, accurate, usable, private, and available when needed. It also applies to how data is gathered, stored, processed, and disposed of. 

Benefits of Data Governance for an Organization

There are multiple benefits to implementing a data governance framework for your company. It helps:

• Improve data protection: Implementing data governance practices helps organizations protect sensitive information including customer data, from cyberattacks.
• Improve compliance: It ensures adherence to data protection and privacy laws and reduces the risk of noncompliance penalties or fees.
• Give you reliable insights: High-quality data with strong data accuracy enables you to analyze data effectively, leading to reliable insights and key performance indicators that aid in strategic decision-making.
• Earn customer and partner trust: Enhanced security measures protecting your organization’s data assets can encourage loyalty from your customers and key stakeholders.

4 Pillars of Data Governance

The 4 key pillars of data governance provide the foundation for effective data management and establish the framework needed to implement comprehensive practices that manage, use, and protect data assets across the organization. Understanding and implementing these 4 pillars of data governance is essential for any organization looking to maximize the value of their data assets.

1. Data Quality

1 of the first 4 pillars of data governance – data quality refers to how good, accurate, and reliable your data is. It’s about ensuring that data is complete and useful. When you have high-quality data, you can trust the information you have and use it to make better, more informed decisions. 

Data quality helps you achieve the following:

• Accurate information: Regular audits and validation processes are necessary to achieve data accuracy.
• Reliable data:  Data stewards implement data governance policies and processes that help to maintain data consistency and integrity, which is key to achieving reliable data.
• Complete data: Your organization can make more informed decisions when you have access to all relevant insights.
• Timely information: The data is always available when needed. Regular updates and ensuring access to this information are key.

2. Data Stewardship

Data stewardship focuses on managing data assets and overseeing an organization’s data. Data stewards ensure that data is properly defined, stored, and maintained according to established governance standards and policies within your data governance framework.

With data stewardship, the focus is on strengthening a company’s data management efforts and overall performance. This key pillar involves:

• Accountability: Certain teams will be responsible for different components of maintaining the data’s integrity, which can encourage accountability.
• Team coordination: The data stewards will coordinate across your different departments and ensure that the agreed-upon policies are followed.
• Responsibility: Data stewards are responsible for ensuring the proper use and management of the data.

3. Data Protection and Compliance

As the name suggests, data protection and compliance is about keeping your information safe and implementing measures to safeguard sensitive data from unauthorized access.

In addition, it involves ensuring that your company’s data storing, processing, and management systems adhere to regulatory requirements that govern data privacy and security. This includes implementing the necessary measures to prevent unauthorized access, breaches, and data misuse while complying with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws, and other relevant regulations. 

Data protection and regulatory successful data governance framework compliance have many benefits. The most notable is that they help you avoid costly penalties, legal liabilities, and reputation damage that often accompany system breaches.

4. Data Management

Once you have good, quality data, organizing and managing it is essential to easily access it when needed. This is where the 4th pillar of data governance comes in – data management. In a nutshell, data management is about storing, structuring, and retrieving data easily.

Data management involves:

• Collection: Collect data from internal systems and external databases. Establishing a reliable collection protocol is key to ensuring accurate data collection.
• Storage: Store your data securely and efficiently to prevent unauthorized access so that relevant parties can easily access it when necessary.
• Analysis: Your team will need to analyze the data using data analytics tools to gain insights to help you make informed decisions.

Data Governance Best Practices

Implementing the 4 pillars of data governance can help you meet key organizational goals. Here are a few important steps to take.

1. Define Your Goals

Clearly outline the objectives of data governance within your organization. Given the increasing number of data breaches over the past few years, it’s also essential to emphasize security as a core component.

2. Integrate Data Security Practices

Multiple data security best practices can help you ensure your data’s integrity. This involves:

• Limiting access to sensitive data based on roles and responsibilities.
• Encrypting data in transit and while it’s at rest.
• Conducting regular security assessments.
• Keeping your systems, software, and applications up to date.
• Complying with data privacy and protection laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

3. Collaborate With Management and Security Teams

When it comes to data governance, operating in data silos isn’t effective. That’s why it’s essential to encourage collaboration between your management and security teams. This will help ensure compliance and that all the data security measures are aligned with the overall governance goals and strategies.

4. Train Your Employees

Provide regular training sessions to your employees to educate them on the latest data security best practices and how to implement them. Creating a culture of data security awareness is also essential. Too often, cyberattacks occur because of human error and a lack of employee training and awareness. Encouraging a proactive approach to data security can help protect your organization.

5. Continuously Monitor and Improve

A data governance program requires an ongoing approach. The systems and processes you implement today may not be relevant in a few years. That’s why it’s essential to continuously monitor and evaluate your data governance process to help detect and respond to threats quickly, ensure compliance with evolving regulations, and ensure you keep your data secured.

Achieve Data Governance Seamlessly with Zmanda

Data governance plays an incredible role in enhancing business data security, quality, and compliance. Continuously monitoring and evaluating your governance plan can help you meet the evolving data security needs. 

With Zmanda, you can seamlessly meet all 4 pillars data governance. The platform supports these goals by protecting data with hybrid cloud setups and scalable backup solutions, so your information is never truly lost.

Are you ready to learn more about how we can protect your data from getting into the wrong hands? Book a free 30-minute consultation with one of our data protection experts or test our platform to see some of its incredible capabilities, including how Zmanda supports the 4 pillars of data governance using the 14-day free trial.