Top 10 Most Expensive Data Breaches in History
In 2024, the average cost of a data breach in the U.S. was $9.36 million, while the globa...
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 proper governance.
There are four key data governance pillars, and each one plays a significant role in ensuring that companies manage their data more effectively to reduce risks, improve decision-making, and enhance data security.
What are the 4 pillars of data governance? How do they work? Most importantly, how can you implement them to achieve success in your organization? We’ve created this detailed guide to help answer all these questions and more.
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.
There are multiple benefits to implementing a data governance framework for your company. It helps:
The 4 pillars of data governance give us the framework to manage, use, and protect data effectively.Â
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.Â
Data quality helps you achieve the following:
Data stewardship focuses on managing and overseeing an organization’s data. Your data steward would ensure that data is adequately defined, stored, and maintained according to established governance standards and policies.
With data stewardship, the focus is on strengthening a company’s data management efforts and overall performance. This key pillar involves:
As the name suggests, data protection and compliance is about keeping your information safe and protecting it from getting into the wrong hands.
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 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.
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:
Implementing the 4 pillars of data governance can help you meet key organizational goals. Here are a few important steps to take.
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.
Multiple data security best practices can help you ensure your data’s integrity. This involves:
When it comes to data governance, operating as silos isn’t effective. That’s why it’s essential to encourage collaboration between your management and security teams. This will help ensure that all the data security measures are aligned with the overall governance goals and strategies.
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.
Data governance is 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 your systems to help detect and respond to threats quickly and ensure you keep your data secured.
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 four data governance goals. 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 follows the 4 pillars of data governance using the 14-day free trial.