Every modern business is dealing with much higher volumes of data today than they were even five years ago. In general, the amount of data generated by people and computers grows every day. Statistics show that the amount of data created and replicated reached a new high of 64.2 zettabytes in 2020, and it’s forecast to grow to more than 180 zettabytes by 2025. Getting a handle on this explosive data growth is the modern business’ next challenge—one that should not go on the back burner.
Protecting your data is an important part of your overall company security strategy, and it involves several components. Data governance is an essential one, so all organizations today should have a solid understanding of what data governance is and how it fits into your approach to cybersecurity.
What Is Data Governance?
Data governance is a practice that ensures your organization’s data is available, usable, trustworthy, and safe. It protects data and also guarantees its integrity and consistency. It prevents data from being misused by enforcing your internal policies, standards, and permissions. Without data governance, you have little-to-no control over your data, which renders it both useless and ripe for abuse by malicious cyber actors.
A strong data governance approach consists of a group of people that create your internal policies and standards for governing data, which are then put into practice and overseen by an additional group of people. These groups may consist of executives and other stakeholders as well as IT and/or data management staff.
Data governance should not be confused with data management, which is the bigger umbrella under which data governance and other data-related strategies fall. Data management refers to the capturing, organizing, and storing of data so your organization can properly analyze and use it.
Why Is Data Governance Essential for Modern Cybersecurity?
You can think of data governance almost like human resources (HR) for your employees. As your employee size grows, you grow increasingly aware that you need an HR department to keep employees abiding by company policies. HR ensures things run smoothly and no employee is causing problems for others. Data governance does something similar with your data. It ensures that your data is consistent with your policies to ensure many aspects of your business function smoothly—including your security efforts.
Data governance helps you prevent data misuse—a crucial part of any worthwhile security strategy. The 2021 Verizon Data breach Investigations Report found that out of all the threat actors that performed privilege abuse, 99 percent were internal. The most common data type stolen was personal information. Depending on your industry, you cannot afford to break with compliance and expose any sensitive data—especially PII. Data governance helps you adhere to industry regulations of all types.
Additionally, data governance helps you maintain your data integrity, meaning you can rely on it to contribute to accurate analytics, reporting, and business intelligence. It helps you avoid operating with data siloes that fragment your business information and ensures you have common data definitions. By identifying and fixing errors in data sets, you’ll improve data quality and increase analytics accuracy. Stronger analytics means you’re able to make smarter business decisions.
Establish Strong Data Governance Today
Data governance is just one aspect of your security and data strategies that will set you up for breach-free success this year and in the future. Along with data governance, you should implement practices such as data loss prevention, device management, endpoint protection, and more. We recently hosted an event around protecting your data with Microsoft 365 Compliance and Data Loss Prevention. If you missed the opportunity to attend, the recording is located on our YouTube channel. At Point Alliance, we recommend you perform a regular tenant assessment of your Microsoft tenant as well. If you have questions about any of these tools or strategies, our experts are just a click away. Get in touch with us today to learn more.
