Defining a data governance strategy
Data governance is the process of managing and protecting your organization’s data. It defines the different roles employees have to play across departments to cover all sectors of the business and promotes a data-protection culture within the organization.
A data governance policy also lays out all the relevant standards to ensure information remains accurate, secure, and compliant with regulations like the General Data Protection Act (GDPR), which covers personal privacy and security in Europe, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which protects confidentiality in the USA.
Building a robust data governance strategy
To develop a robust data governance strategy, you must ensure data accuracy, security, and compliance across all domains within your organization. This means establishing clear guidelines, gathering requirements and securing buy-in from all stakeholders, and assigning key roles to ensure these policies are upheld.
Implementing all these practices to guarantee legal compliance while maintaining operational efficiency can seem challenging. That's why having a flexible and scalable reporting platform like Jaspersoft is so important.
Key considerations for crafting your data governance strategy
To implement your data governance strategy, you need to understand and address several key factors right from the start. These include data ownership and key roles, data quality assurance, and data security and compliance.
Clarifying data ownership and key roles
Like any system, data governance requires having key players who understand, monitor, and take responsibility for the process. Five key roles you need to fill to ensure your data is protected every step of the way include:
Data owners
Data owners are responsible for ensuring the accuracy and integrity of data within their assigned domain. They must guarantee that data is up-to-date and free from errors from its creation to its archive or deletion.
They are also responsible for ensuring that data complies with external regulations like GDPR or HIPAA. This often means that data needs to be easily accessible by anyone who has a legal right to view it.
Project managers
Data governance project managers need to ensure that any data-related initiatives are carried out on time, on budget, and comply with all external regulations. They are responsible for communicating all benefits and risks of adopting new systems to stakeholders and playing a crucial role when upgrading software.
The project manager's role is crucial as an organization needs genuine understanding and buy-in from all stakeholders to succeed in a platform overhaul. With Jaspersoft, project managers can track data projects, manage upgrades, and ensure compliance, streamlining stakeholder communication.
Data governance managers
Data governance managers also hold a lot of responsibility for informing stakeholders of changes to how data is handled, but their focus is from a policy point of view. They are responsible for planning and implementing internal data management policies. These internal policies must comply with external regulations and fit in with the company culture to ensure a seamless migration of methods.
Business analysts
Business analysts assess the current state of an organization's data management practices, identify gaps in procedures, and make recommendations for improvements. They find opportunities by closely tracking performance metrics and analyzing trends in data accuracy. They work closely with IT and business teams to ensure that new data handling policies align with both user and business needs.
Jaspersoft’s robust analytics and reporting tools provide analysts with performance metrics and insights, helping them track data accuracy and spot trends for continuous improvement.
Data Architects
Data architects are responsible for designing a system that ensures data is securely stored and flows efficiently. They should try to reduce data silos in favor of integrating multiple data sources for effective communication. The design they choose is critical to the flexibility and scalability of an organization's data governance.
Ensuring data quality assurance
Once you address the factors above, these three steps will help ensure you maintain high-quality data.
Setting standards
This means creating guidelines for consistency in formats, naming conventions, and validation rules. This is a critical step for quality assurance when entering, storing, and processing data. These standards reduce ambiguity and ensure data consistency across the organization, which is vital for accurate reporting.
Performing quality audits
To maintain the integrity of your data management, it’s crucial to carry out regular data profiling and validation checks. Data profiling analyzes structure, content, and quality to identify inconsistencies, duplicates, or incomplete records. Validation checks guarantee all data entered follows your organizational standards.
Implementing error resolution
Just as there needs to be a transparent process for correctly entering data, there also needs to be one for dealing with errors. The method includes identifying the mistake, logging it, assigning someone to fix it, and tracking the solution until completion. A precise and repeatable system for error resolution ensures accountability and consistency in resolving errors.
Maintaining optimal data security and compliance
To maintain data security and remain compliant with regulations, follow these three steps.
Apply permissions and access control
To ensure data security, you have to guarantee only authorized parties handle it. One way of securing this is through role-based access controls (RBAC). RBAC assigns specific permissions to specific roles. For example, the HR manager may have access to different sets of information than the Marketing Director.
Jaspersoft offers multi-level security, at the user, application, and domain levels. This allows administrators to control data access based on user roles, with flexibility for multi-role assignments.
You can also set row-level and column-level security. Depending on the users' roles, some aspects of a more comprehensive data set may be hidden. These more granular controls may be useful when dealing with environments holding sensitive data. For example, school administrators may need access to a student’s name and address, but only some users need access to their standardized test scores.
Give people access to their data
Compliance with data protection standards is a legal requirement for all US and European organizations. How personal data is handled is governed by GDPR in Europe and HIPAA in the USA. These laws state that you must give people access to their own information and be able to provide an audit trail of who has accessed this information and when.
Jaspersoft supports audit logging for data access, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements.
Implement security features
All data-related software should implement a few key security features to ensure data integrity.
Strong authentication methods like multi-factor authentication (MFA) make it considerably harder for passwords to be hacked.
HTTPS secures communications between users and servers on websites.
Data encryption guarantees that the information cannot be understood without a decryption key, even if a data breach exists.
Firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and anti-malware technology all go further in preventing possible attacks on your data.
Jaspersoft includes additional security measures, such as SQL injection prevention, password encryption, and restricted file uploads, to minimize vulnerabilities.
Get started building your data governance with Jaspersoft
Jaspersoft provides advanced embedded analytics and customizable reporting while maintaining strong security measures. With internal and external authentication measures, password policies, resource permissions, assigned roles, and other security tools and protocols, Jaspersoft ensures your gathered data remains safe.
Contact us to learn more about how Jaspersoft fits your organization's data governance needs.
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