5 Ways to Balance Your Data Democratization with Data Compliance Needs

Data is everybody’s business, according to MIT, encouraging firms to treat data as a strategic asset. The democratization of data sees more of it in use across teams and departments to help deliver process efficiencies, improve strategic planning through analytics and encourage a broader understanding of business dynamics.

Vendors promote increasingly smart AI tools to organizations to help them learn from data. The insights garnered can be on anything, from customer preferences and engagement in marketing to supply chain dynamics and strategic planning. Then, there’s the endless push for greater and deeper analytics to drive product and services innovation.

On the flip side, the move by IT from traditional security mechanisms to zero trust regimes that restrict access to data and services at a more granular level is part of a changing landscape in how businesses and workers store and access data.

Instead of sharing passwords, emailing files to each other or storing them in insecure clouds, the onus is now on protecting sensitive data across the business to defend the organization from endless and phishing and hacking efforts and regulatory fines when any breach occurs.

Balancing the need for democratic access to data and ensuring it’s correctly classified, legally protected and secure is a vital part of the data manager or IT security role. This is achievable but requires clarity and awareness across the business.

The risks of poor data security

Sharing a file between colleagues might sound innocuous, but all it takes is for a device to be stolen, hacked or compromised. Similarly, mistakenly giving out data with customer or financial information or sharing access to that really-useful cloud service that everyone knows the password to is all it takes for an expensive breach to occur.

Any of those little assumptions where workers believe something is compliant and safe could place the business in breach of GDPR, HIPAA or one of the many guidelines in force across most regions or sectors.

This creates a major concern for IT leaders and data or security managers. A major breach can have massive implications for the business, with fines in the million dollar range often levied against well-known names who, theoretically, had all the pieces in place to prevent such an incident.

5 best practices for balancing democratization with compliance

To balance the need for security and compliance with the need to help grow the business, you need a clear policy that reaches out across all parts of the organization.

Many businesses have put a moat around their data that inhibits business activity. As Gartner puts it, “... we live in an age of data democracy. A world where tools deliver unparalleled access to information (e.g., Google), one where the non-technical employee aspires for the same level of access to data as someone in their Analytics or IT department.”

1. Have a data democratization plan

From the top, balancing the need for data and compliance requires the committed support of leadership, with the sponsorship of clearly stated aims, including:

• Improved communication across the business
• Faster access to time-sensitive data
• Delivery of improvement or savings to make the process worthwhile

2. Identify data, users and risk

To deliver that, the team responsible needs:

• An accurate audit of all data that crosses the business
• The people and teams who need access to each file or service
• Oversight of access and security limitations
• Timeline for delivery, and budget estimates

This is done by asking the right questions, such as:

• What data do we have or plan to create?
• What happened to old data that we may still have?
• What are our data governance obligations?
• What are the threats to our data?
• What has gone wrong with businesses similar to ours?
• How do we automate our processes to make this easier and reduce the governance and democracy workload?

When the answers to those questions are found, the team needs to claim ownership of the responsibilities and drive the necessary business change to ensure data democratization and governance happen in harmony. Software solutions can carry much of the burden for governance and take place as part of broader digital business initiatives or data security process improvements.

3. Look out for silos and data weak points

Data silos are a well-known pain point in digital operations. One set of information that’s inaccessible elsewhere or visible only to a select few can have a significant impact on the business. Use your data audit exercise to identify and eliminate silos, or update the applications that create them.

4. Ensure training and knowledge-sharing for all users

Even if your data governance scheme is a success, most firms will find that people are all too willing to fall back into old habits and patterns. While your auditing and governance software might identify these, eliminate the risk by reinforcing rules and training users to avoid bad data practices, report examples they find and consider how data benefits the business outside of primary use cases.

5. Prepare for a data-led future

For the future of the business, fresh data sources must be streamlined into the processes to ensure correct governance and vibrant democracy. As data becomes the focal point for a broader set of users, all employees, new hires and new leaders should understand the business requirements for security while encouraging innovation and preventing users from creating fresh business risk. 

Quest’s solutions, including Data Empowerment, offer largely automated solutions to catalog, identify and highlight data that provide enterprise visibility to deliver metadata management and automation. These make governance a streamlined part of the business, enabling data democratization to be carried out securely and safely.