DGIQ 2021: Today’s Data Governance Conversation

We had a great time last week at DGIQ in San Diego! Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth to chat – it was fantastic to see you all in person! We had some thought-provoking conversations, and we heard some similar themes across those discussions. Many people we spoke to were focused on the process and policy-writing part of data governance, others were just starting their governance journey with a data catalogue, and many more were feeling the pressure from the disruption Snowflake is creating as their companies rapidly move data to the cloud.

Although data governance has been around a while, the industry may be more confusing or bewildering or exciting than ever before. With that in mind, we’ve gathered a few resources to address some of the discussions we had:

What does “data governance” even mean today?

While the idea of data governance is not new, how it is defined seems to be shifting as data becomes critical to more companies across every industry. In the past, vendors may have just focused on helping you know about your data: data discovery, data classification and data cataloging. ALTR CEO Dave Sikora has written a couple of posts explaining why just knowing about and cataloguing your data is not enough in today’s regulatory environment. The true end goal has to be keeping sensitive data safe and secure.

Is there just one right way to implement data governance?

Many of the people we spoke to seemed to believe that a data governance journey has to be sequential: you start with data cataloguing, then you write policies that define who gets access to the data and how, then you hand that off to your security team to implement the control and enforcement. But the truth is you don’t necessarily have to go in order and maybe you shouldn’t. What if you could easily find and classify sensitive data, place policy-based controls on it AND start to see how it’s used all at the same time, in one tool? What if seeing how data is used gave you surprising insights that affected the policies you place around it? These blog posts from ALTR’s Pete Martin, Doug Wick, and Paul Franz explain why to consider a different approach and how ALTR can help.

When should you begin data governance and security?

The fast pace of data movement to the cloud has stirred up all kinds of issues, with data governance and security sometimes treated as an afterthought. Teams may think it’s too soon or they’re just getting started. ALTR CTO James Beecham explains why sooner is actually better to make sure you’re getting the most of your cloud data warehouse. And why it doesn’t have to be time-consuming, complicated, costly or slow down the project – embracing a data control and protection solution from the beginning can actually help teams keep up with the speed of their business.