This month’s topic is something I wouldn’t have considered a decade ago. Especially in the US, this isn’t something that I’d actually have cared about for most of my career. Even when companies talked about governance, it was more a checkbox exercise.
Dr. Victoria Holt brings us this invitation from the UK, and I think it’s a great one. This is a data topic that will impact more and more of us in the future. Not all of us, but certainly plenty of us.
If you haven’t thought about this topic, I’d urge you to write something, even if it’s a view that this isn’t necessary. Share your thoughts, this month or in the future.
Data Governance Effort
My employer, Redgate Software, has been interested in this for a number of years. We are a UK company, and when the GDPR passed, we knew this would be a concern for us and our customers.
We built a product to help customers classify and understand their exposure in databases. I hope this expands out to other sources, because I feel this is a constant challenge. While lots of data is in database, we are constantly pulling it out and sharing it in files, reports, and more.
Security is hard, and I don’t know that we’ll end up completely controlling the access and data, but I do think that we need to understand where our risk and exposure are as we share data.
This is a hard job, and a boring one. I can’t see many people enjoying the process of dealing with data governance. We need to make this easy to do, in a distributed fashion by many people as they notice something is not being managed. At the same time, I think that we need to be regularly reviewing and examining security against policies. We have far too many public access points being used to share information when things should be secured.
I don’t know how we reconcile those things, and decide on the value of doing them. Some products may work well, some I think are too targeted, and some too expensive.
I believe data governance matters, but not sure how we actually get to a place that it’s well done in many organizations. Especially in the US.
I hope I’m wrong.