Data governance truly involves a cyclical process, and organizations must revisit the stages periodically as data sources and business processes change. While various regulatory environments and business needs involve unique approaches, this post outlines the stages of a standard data governance lifecycle.

1. Define the Purpose and Goals

Any successful data governance program starts with an assessment of the current data and regulatory landscape. While technologies and trends support data governance, strategic planning should focus on identifying existing risks and business priorities.

For instance, for many organizations regulatory compliance needs provide the initial motivation for gaining control of data assets. Another key driver might include improving data quality to support AI initiatives or other innovations.

Whatever the motivation, an initial step will involve identifying risks and practices that present obstacles to attaining business goals. For example, insufficient data security will compromise regulatory compliance. And poor data quality will reduce the effectiveness of decision making and AI initiatives.

2. Build a Roadmap

With an understanding of the reasons and goals for data governance in the organization, it is time to put together a detailed plan. Begin by identifying the data elements throughout the organization. Look at the types of data collected, the data sources and data owners, and how the organization uses the data.

Next, assess the quality of the organization’s data. Several factors affect data quality. For example, outdated or redundant data will reduce the accuracy of data-driven decision making. Likewise, incomplete data will diminish the reliability of data analytics. And inconsistencies across systems and processes can lead to confusion and errors.

Once you have a detailed picture of the data landscape and the challenges involved, you can construct a data governance plan. This strategic plan will include identifying the steps needed to implement data governance, the key stakeholders, necessary resources, and priorities.

3. Design the Data Governance Strategy

Primary goals of the data governance framework involve establishing standards for data management. They also involve ensuring data security and empowering employees throughout the organization to find and use data effectively.

First, the data governance framework will include determining data governance roles and responsibilities. Properly managing data involves input from stakeholders throughout the organization. Some common roles include data governance sponsors and council, data owners, data custodians, data stewards, and data users.

Next, comprehensive policies and procedures around data access, usage, management, and security form the backbone of a data governance framework. For instance, regulations like PCI DSS and HIPAA impose strict rules around data retention. And numerous privacy laws necessitate security policies to protect sensitive data.

4. Implement the Data Governance Program

With policies and procedures outlined and strategies documented, the real work begins. Technology can play a crucial role in this process. For example, automation can significantly reduce the time involved in labeling and tracking sensitive data. Likewise, automating data retention and destruction policies improves accuracy and defensibility.

Technology solutions can both reduce risk and save time. These solutions will include proactive data security, data compliance monitoring, and comprehensive records management, along with eDiscovery solutions that provide essential visibility into unstructured data.

Additionally, the data governance program must address the human factor, building a culture of data governance from top to bottom. Thus, the program necessarily includes educating and training stakeholders about data governance policies and procedures and their role in maintaining data integrity.

5. Continuously Monitor

Data governance requires continuous monitoring to ensure enforcement of data governance policies and proactively identify risks. This includes both regular audits and automated data compliance monitoring.

6. Review and Adapt

The final stage involves evaluating the effectiveness of data governance initiatives and refining processes and policies accordingly. As new data sets and security risks emerge, and as processes within the organization change, the data governance framework will need to change, as well.

Conduct regular reviews with senior executives and key stakeholders. Track progress against key objectives, measure results, and make any needed adjustments.

Leverage Expert Resources Throughout the Stages of a Data Governance Lifecycle

Many organizations effectively utilize information governance solutions to streamline the data governance process. Working with organizations like eMazzanti Technologies and Messaging Architects provides access to both extensive expertise and cutting-edge technologies.

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Consider the vast amount of sensitive data held by county governments. Without appropriate information governance, sensitive information related to local citizens and businesses could be vulnerable to breach. And when mismanaged data makes it difficult to fulfill public records requests, governments incur penalties and lose face with the public.

On the other hand, when that same county government manages, secures, and uses data effectively, they achieve critical goals of accountability, transparency and efficiency. Decision makers have reliable access to quality data, and public trust in the governing process increases. These same benefits apply to organizations in all industries.

What is eGovernance?

eGovernance refers to electronic governance, specifically governance of electronic information. As in the county government example above, common goals of eGovernance include improving data access, strengthening data security, driving efficiency and productivity and promoting accountability.

That is, organizations need to know what data they have, where it lives, who owns it and who can access it. They need to ensure that they data they own is high quality and secure from breach. And they need to achieve compliance with legislation and other regulations that govern data.

Information Governance Challenges

Today’s data environment poses significant challenges for information governance. In the first place, organizations collect massive amounts of data every day from many disparate sources. These include Teams documents, customer input from company websites, emails, meeting recordings, chat messages, data from IoT devices and much more.

Because information lives in so many different places, including BYOD devices and remote locations, identifying and securing that data proves challenging. At the same time, the regulatory environment grows more complex every year.

Technology trends such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence offer exciting capabilities. But they also complicate the cyber security environment and introduce new privacy and ethics concerns.

Finally, decision makers and data analytics tools need clean, trustworthy data. This requires comprehensive checks for duplicates, errors, and outdated information. It also requires a balance between facilitating data access and ensuring data protection and privacy.

eGovernance Solution Companies Best Practices Deliver Key Benefits

By following best practices for information governance, organizations do more than ease the path to regulatory compliance. They also reduce risk, ensure appropriate access to high quality data, and improve business planning.

An effective information governance program steps beyond checkbox compliance. For instance, in addition to ensuring the implementation of appropriate data security controls, proactive organizations will conduct penetration testing.

In addition, automating repetitive or redundant tasks such as tagging data and processing permission requests helps to reduce error. In fact, automation proves essential to managing an increasingly complex data environment.

As organizations migrate some or all their data to the cloud, they will need to adjust the tools they use to manage their data. Look for tools designed specifically to find and manage data across multiple clouds and on-premises environments.

Partner with eGovernance Solution Companies to Achieve Business Goals

An eGovernance solution company will help you choose and implement information governance solutions tailored to your business needs. The consultants at eMazzanti Technologies and Messaging Architects deliver a fully managed, cloud-based solution for preserving, discovering, and accessing digital data across your data environments.

Our data experts will begin by assisting you to build a comprehensive data and records management plan to reduce unstructured data and risk. A state-of-the-art archiving solution facilitates policy-based retention and destruction of data, regardless of Microsoft license type. Add our powerful eDiscovery tool and digital compliance solutions to gain the transparency, accountability, and efficiency your organization needs.

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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

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The post eGovernance Solution Companies Tackle Complex Information Governance Challenges appeared first on eGovernance.

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.