What on earth is data fabric governance? And why does it matter to your business?
Data fabric
A data fabric is a unified and integrated structure that enables seamless access, sharing, and processing of data from various sources, formats, and locations. It brings together your data lakes, data warehouses, databases, other data storage systems, and data processing and analytics tools. Your data fabric can be an asset, if it is well managed and clearly structured, or it can be a really serious liability, if it is convoluted and disorganized.
Data fabric governance
Data fabric governance refers to the management and control of data across an organization's data fabric. Our product ORIGIN, is a data fabric governance platform that enables the integration, management, and control of datasets across regions.
Data fabric governance makes it possible to integrate and manage data across multiple systems and locations and provides a unified view of data by abstracting certain things so that data can be accessed, processed and analyzed legally and securely. It allows data to be transformed, redacted, de-identified, or anonymized across your business and its jurisdictions and domains.
Key concepts
Some key concepts to understand, when it comes to data fabric governance, include:
- Data quality management: Ensuring data accuracy, consistency, and completeness by implementing data validation, cleansing, and enrichment processes.
- Data security: Protecting data from unauthorized access, tampering, or breaches through access controls, encryption, and other security measures.
- Data privacy: Safeguarding the privacy of sensitive and personal information by implementing appropriate data handling, storage, and processing practices in line with data protection laws such as GDPR, HIPAA, or CCPA.
- Data lineage and traceability: Tracking data flow through the data fabric, including its origin, transformations, and usage, to ensure transparency and maintain a clear audit trail.
- Data cataloging and metadata management: Creating and maintaining a comprehensive inventory of the organization's data assets, along with relevant metadata, to facilitate easy discovery, understanding, and utilization of data.
- Data access and usage control: Defining and enforcing policies for data access, sharing, and usage to ensure compliance with internal and external requirements.
- Compliance and regulatory management: Ensuring that the data fabric adheres to relevant industry regulations, standards, and best practices.
Growing profitably
Data fabric governance is the most important thing to growing your business profitably. It is crucial to deriving maximum value from your data, mitigating risks, and ensuring compliance with legal and ethical requirements. It helps to foster trust among stakeholders, streamline data operations, and support data-driven decision-making.
Done well, data fabric governance can help you navigate the challenges of distributed, complex, modern data architectures so that you can easily manage and use data across different systems and locations in a unified and secure way.
