In essence, the data steward acts as the guardian of data assets, ensuring their accuracy, consistency, accessibility, and usability. Data stewards generally work in IT but collaborate closely with departments across the organization. Thus, they act as a bridge between the technical and business sides, requiring a unique skillset.

Data Stewardship Puts Data Governance into Practice

Data stewardship plays a pivotal role in effective data governance, translating policies into practice. A data governance framework includes the policies and guidelines for data handling, quality, and security. Data stewards have responsibility for ensuring the implementation and enforcement of these policies.

For example, to enforce data quality standards and ensure trustworthy data for decision making, a data steward might conduct regular data audits to identify inaccuracies or inconsistencies. They could then implement data cleansing processes to eliminate duplicate entries, correct errors, and update outdated information.

Or, to ensure that data access falls within regulatory compliance restrictions, the data steward might design and oversee role-based user access controls. This helps the company achieve a fine balance between data democratization and critical data security.

In implementing data governance policies, the data steward collaborates closely with other data governance roles. For instance, data stewards work closely with data custodians, who provide technical support and maintenance related to data. They also work in tandem with data owners in various departments, as well as the data scientists who retrieve and analyze data.

Responsibilities of a Data Steward

Data stewards oversee all activities related to data management. This multi-faceted role includes several main categories of responsibility:

• Data quality assurance – This involves monitoring data for errors or inconsistencies, as well as implementing processes to maintain data accuracy.
• Data security and compliance – Data stewards ensure the protection of data from unauthorized access. They implement security measures, make sure data usage complies with legal and regulatory requirements, and raise awareness about data security best practices.
• Data accessibility and usability – Stewards balance strict data security standards with making sure that authorized users can find and use data. This involves building a data inventory, maintaining data lineage, managing metadata, and so forth.
• Data advocacy – Data stewards promote data value by educating stakeholders on data quality principles, encouraging responsible data usage, and promoting strategic uses of data, such as data-driven decision making.

Businesses May Have Multiple Data Stewards

This responsibility list looks daunting and often proves more than one data steward can reasonably accomplish. Consequently, a company may assign multiple stewards to handle various aspects of data stewardship.

For example, the organization may assign separate data stewards to work with specific types of data, such as customer data. They may also assign stewards according to business function, such as sales or R&D. Alternatively, a data steward may have responsibility for one or more IT systems, such as email.

Skills to Look for in a Data Steward

Because data stewards cover both technical and culture-focused activities, they need a balance of various types of skills. Without a doubt, the job requires technical skills, including data modeling, databases, and database management systems. And in fact, data stewards often report up through IT.

But data stewards also need interpersonal skills and business acumen. Because they act as a liaison between IT and business functions, in addition to promoting good data practices throughout the company, they must be able to communicate and collaborate effectively. Additionally, they often act as subject matter experts in their area of responsibility.

Who are Data Stewards and Why are They Important for Your Business? Explore Key Benefits

Data stewards play a central role in implementing data governance and ensuring a healthy data ecosystem. They not only protect and manage data, but they also help the company navigate a complex data landscape and leverage data for strategic advantage. And as data plays an increasingly vital part in decision making and innovation, this role has become mission critical.

To set the stage for success, hire the right people and give them the tools they need to thrive. eGovernance solutions for information governance offer powerful, cloud-based solutions to help organizations use their information effectively and drive data value.

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Managed by the information governance experts at eMazzanti Technologies and powered by iPro, eGovernance.com solutions empower businesses to effectively manage their data with hosted solutions for electronic data discovery, security, and compliance.

Reduce Costs with Affordable Information Governance

A data breach poisons reputation and piles up recovery costs. And mismanaged information adds risk in an age governed by privacy regulation. Information governance supplies the controls, access, and protections required, now at a cost most businesses can afford.

When companies know where their data lives and who owns it, they begin to unlock its potential by putting it to work. And with comprehensive data security, categorization, and management across the life of the data, innovation flourishes.

In addition to enabling innovation, affordable information governance solutions deliver a host of business benefits, including:

• • Reduced eDiscovery costs
  • Reduced risk of a costly data breach or mishandling of sensitive data
  • Decreased overhead and liabilities arising from obsolete information
  • Increased productivity when employees quickly find needed data, rather than piling up repetitive or conflicting information
  • Faster access to useful business information resulting from improved organization

Affordable Data and Records Management

Data and records management means identifying, organizing, and cleaning up data to make it more useful.  Organizations benefit from solutions that cover the entire data lifecycle, beginning with a simple data audit and including sensible processes, policies, and procedures.

For example, data tagging enables the organization of strategic business information into suitable categories for eDiscovery. Tagging allows users to quickly and accurately search millions of emails and files to find essential information.

On the other hand, search solutions that return inconsistent results, work slowly, or become difficult to use often lengthen the eDiscovery process, resulting in increased costs.

With data properly organized, regulatory compliance becomes much easier, hence less costly. Data managers easily implement retention policies to automate archival and deletion of obsolete or redundant information. Likewise, the identification of sensitive data blocks unauthorized access or sharing and the loss of proprietary information.

Efficient eDiscovery

The cloud-based data indexing and eDiscovery platform from eGovernance^® simplifies the eDiscovery process. Its rich eDiscovery tools greatly aid in the distribution and collection of relevant data to improve the speed and efficiency of requests across multiple disparate systems and Office 365 licensing levels. eDiscovery teams work faster with reduced discovery overhead.

Legal teams empowered to create and track discovery cases, search, and export content without engaging IT. Even better, complex searches take just seconds to perform, because documents are classified with searchable tags and comments.

Cost-Effective Digital Compliance Management

Regulatory compliance has become a fact of business life, as inevitable as taxes. eGovernance^® Compliance solutions reduce compliance monitoring time and effort and enable internal investigations with no outsourcing. They deliver data visibility, both on-premises and in the cloud, through a single console.

In addition, eGovernance^® monitoring tools allow compliance/security teams to tackle all regulations simultaneously, including HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, SOX, PCI-DSS and more. Reporting options provide proof of policy and regulatory compliance. Further, users remediate all sensitive data automatically or manually from the same user interface.

Knowing the information you have and where it is aids discovery and records management. But from a security and compliance perspective, organizations both must know if there are breaches and be able to do something about them.

While some solutions stop data from being created that contravenes data compliance policies, a solution is also required that allows that content to be quarantined, reviewed, and moved. eGovernance provides compliance options to quarantine, review, delete, or return potentially suspicious documents and email residing in your systems.

Multi-layered Data Security Strategies

The perfect storm of cloud migration, increasing cyber-attacks, and remote work security challenges have left data more at risk than ever. Thus, data security forms a necessary and increasingly outsourced piece of an overall information governance strategy.

The experienced consultants at eGovernance.com have lived the transformation from closed data storage systems to cloud-based systems. They audit and identify potential security risks, then tailor multi-layered cybersecurity strategies to support business goals. A variety of security services include email and ransomware protection, mobile device security and more.

Acquire Affordable Information Governance with eGovernance^® Cloud Solutions

Successful businesses strive to increase data security and compliance while tapping into the benefits of big data to drive innovation. eGovernance^® provides the tools to do that efficiently and economically. With cloud-based archiving and eDiscovery solutions, comprehensive data security and compliance monitoring, organizations choose the options to meet their requirements.

Contact us today to explore affordable information governance solutions beginning at just $2.50 per user per month.

Download Article PDF

eGovernance Cloud Solutions

eGovernance is a Cloud based solution for preserving, discovering and accessing digital data within your email and document storage systems for compliance, audit, security, eDiscovery and warehousing of critical or older data.

Archiving »

eDiscovery »

Compliance »

Schedule Demo

Learn More

The post Achieve Scalable, Secure and Affordable Information Governance appeared first on eGovernance.