Data Governance in the Cloud Era: Challenges and Opportunities

Decentralized computing empowers growth-poised enterprises to optimize operating costs. However, technologies like cloud computing or machine-to-machine communication increase a company’s exposure to cybersecurity risks. This post elaborates on the data governance challenges and opportunities in the cloud era.

What is Data Governance?

Data governance comprises policy creation, technology enhancements, and financial record-keeping to mitigate cybersecurity threats as well as corruption. It also encompasses corporate espionage prevention. Therefore, modern corporations that want to improve their privacy and financial disclosure compliance must leverage data governance solutions.

Some aspects of holistic data governance overlap with data quality management. Meanwhile, other activities are integral to defining communication and authorization workflows. Technological components often include encryption, firewalls, and virtual private networks (VPNs). Likewise, consistent accounting and performance disclosures help preserve investors’ faith in the brand.

A data governance framework influences your business’s technology selection, office productivity, and ransomware resilience. It also presents logical and event-driven standardized operating procedures to educate users on secure interactions with the cloud platforms.

The Role of Data Governance in the Cloud Era

Renting data storage and analysis through online cloud platforms increases flexibility across critical processing stages. The importance of the cloud keeps growing since it helps reduce the hardware-related workload on your in-house IT teams. So, cloud-powered digital transformation has gained momentum across many industries.

However, cybercriminals can exploit the rising popularity of enterprise cloud computing. They might hurt your data security by monitoring unencrypted communication channels or forcing your employees to install illegitimate applications.

The human risks in cloud integration include disgruntled employees leaking companies’ trade secrets or endangering patented business ideas. Otherwise, an underqualified person might make incorrect modifications to central databases. Although data lifecycle management solutions

• can rectify database issues, data governance officers can reduce those threats.

Challenges in Data Governance

1| Employee Skill Development

Organizations must overcome the skill gap issues to raise in-house governance standards and mitigate human risks. They must determine a framework to guide professionals in senior and junior positions on responsible data usage behaviors. If employees deviate from the related principles, companies might become an easy target for cybercriminals and corrupt workers.

2| Software Selection

Several cloud computing and data quality checking tools make exaggerated claims regarding data protection. Nevertheless, you want to explore the available technologies, study your firm’s requirements, and find the competent data partners relevant to your domain. A reputed software vendor will strive to meet your governance expectations.

3| Unpredictable Upgrade Schedules

Specialists might discover a novel computer virus or zero-day vulnerability. As a result, data governance officers (DGOs) and stewards must collaborate with the security experts and patch their company’s systems as soon as possible. The need for security upgrades can arise anytime, leading to unpredictable downtimes that affect productivity.

Opportunities in Data Governance

1| Accurate Reporting

Data governance helps manage high-quality report creation, publishing, and archiving. Therefore, more stakeholders can use these reports without spending resources on re-verifying the documented data points. Remember, accuracy is crucial throughout the corporate decision-making workflows. Inaccurate data skews insights and reduces a strategy’s effectiveness in goal accomplishment.

2| Universal Access

Today, companies let workers access, modify, and share cloud-powered IT sources from their homes, project sites, or clients’ offices. They can do so because data governance integration restricts unauthorized database operations by guarding communication channels. That is one of the dominant factors in the current "work from anywhere" culture.

3| Ransomware Prevention

Cybercriminals target corporate IT and communication systems to hinder your employees’ work, demand ransom, and mine confidential intelligence to auction it on the dark web. Thankfully, DGOs and security analysts capture instances of system intrusions. Therefore, brands can avoid wasting capital due to ransomware attacks.

Conclusion

Data governance professionals will be serving an eight-billion USD market by 2029. Simultaneously, more educational institutions and corporate training programs will offer data governance skill development. These trends are here to stay, given the significance of data governance in the cloud era.

As more stakeholders pressure the companies to adopt strict cybersecurity and disclosure norms, data governance technologies will provide more value for relationship managers. After all, brands can exponentially succeed if they fulfill what the customers and investors demand. As such, enterprises must invest in addressing the challenges to benefit from the data governance opportunities in this cloud era.

I am working as a digital marketing analyst at SG Analytics which is a global data analytics company that provides research and analytics services globally.