Data governance is a critical business operation that allows your business to maximize data storage, reduce costs, mitigate risks, and keep compliance in check so that data delivers business value, rather than contributing to bottomless money pits. Because data governance is responsible for achieving so many critical objectives, it’s important that your organization’s data governance policies and processes are just right.
While data governance tools are not a replacement for your organization’s data governance system, they can support your processes — automating and streamlining specific tasks to reduce the managerial burden on your organization. Here are the data governance tools you can utilize to simplify and streamline this important component of properly and responsibly managing your business data.
Project management system
Data governance is typically managed by more than one person in your company or IT department. Additionally, if your data governance policy is thorough and well communicated, it’s not uncommon for non-IT employees to notice and need to report data integrity issues. While emails, phone calls, and in-person meetings can be used to effectively communicate issues and tasks, but the manner of these communications is often inefficient and disorganized. Project management tools can be used to intelligently and easily communicate tasks, escalate issues, verify that tasks have been adequately completed, and more — saving your IT staff and entire organization time and disorganized headaches. Depending on the size of your organization, you may be able to use a simple tool like Trello to move tasks and issues from board to board as they’re implemented and resolved, or you may implement a tool like JIRA or Happy Fox to organize tasks by priority and need, assign them to the appropriate employee, and resolve issues by ticket.
Data quality analysis software
Good data governance policies put practices in place to run data analyses, health monitoring, cleansing and more. These practices allow you to spot errors in data, duplicate data, database anomalies and more. You can streamline these processes and address errors in data quickly by using a professional data quality tool, like DataCleaner. DataCleaner provides data quality analysis and profiling, duplicate detection, data standardization and cleansing, data health monitoring and more to keep tabs on your data, identify areas for cost savings, and ensure that integrity and quality are upheld.
Automated software
Running manual tasks can add to your IT staff’s already packed to-do list. By adding automated data governance tools and softwares into the mix, you can take manual tasks off of their plates while reducing human error. One easy area to address first is your backup strategy. Data can never be completely safe from data loss, deletion, and integrity lapses while existing on physical storage devices alone. To provide a foolproof method of data backup and recovery, data should be backed up to an off-site location in the cloud where it can be safely accessed and restored to any device. By utilizing cloud backup as a service in your organization, your backups can run automatically so you never skip backing up a newly created or changed file and are always able to recover the data you need from the cloud.
For a cloud backup service that runs continuously and quietly in the background, without interrupting your staff, get 90 days of free cloud backup with Nordic Backup. Nordic Backup can be used on an unlimited number of devices, provides daily backup reports to verify successful backups, and offers unlimited file version histories so you can revert to a file version from any previous point in time in order to retrieve accurate data, making it the perfect solution for governing data in any office environment. Additionally, they also offer server virtualization and hosting to provide zero-downtime solutions to businesses managing data on servers and databases.
Importance of data governance
Lack of proper data governance can lead to data leaks and loss, falling out of compliance with regulatory requirements, downtime, all of which can have major financial and reputational repercussions. By incorporating these time saving data governance tools into your organization, you can get a better handle on the data you utilize daily, reduce errors in data, and streamline your data governance processes quickly and easily.
