Data Governance and Security: The Champions of IT Transformation in the Public Sector
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Join our discussion on All Things Data with Fred Baradari, Federal Partner and Channel Sales Director at Denodo, with a focus on how Data Governance and Security are the real champions in bringing IT transformation.

 

While IT transformation can result in many benefits, such as enhanced data collection capabilities, data-driven customer insights, and an increase in overall agility, ultimately providing a better customer experience, it is critical, in IT transformation, not to forget about data governance and security. 

Data Governance Defined 

Data governance ensures that data integrity is effectively maintained by quality management of data, which includes demonstrating compliance to all applicable privacy and security measures. Data governance provides the principles, policies, process, framework, tools, and metrics required to effectively manage data at all levels from creation to consumption. Through such features, data is made trustworthy, which is key in any IT transformation. 

Government agencies need to integrate and curate volumes of high priority data. They need to be able to identify opportunities to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and translate rich, real-time data into usable information. However, to capture data fully and effectively for decision making, it is imperative to establish defined roles and responsibilities for data stewardship. 

It is important to assign data stewards, data custodians, and a set of functional data managers in order to achieve accountability throughout the entire data lifecycle. Because for too long, the misconception has persisted that keeping data organized and well-governed means keeping it limited. That is just not true; in the long run, it would be beneficial for organizations to offer open access to all the data that data teams require, so they can deliver exceptional digital products.

Such data teams are required to provide structure and a clean data set for analysis, while maintaining all of the rich underlying data. This highlights the need for a complete, built-in toolset for keeping the data organized, accurate, and verified throughout the lifecycle of an analytics project, or any other type of data-centric project. In other words, a new approach to data governance is required. And that new approach is offered by logical data fabric.

Logical Data Fabric and IT transformation for Data Governance

Logical data fabric is an emerging architecture that provides a unified, intelligent, and integrated platform to support new and prominent IT transformation use cases. The sweet spot of logical data fabric is its ability to deliver results quickly by leveraging innovation in dynamic integration, distributed and multi-cloud architectures, graph engines, and distributed, in-memory, and persistent memory platforms. Logical data fabric also focuses on automating data integration process transformations, preparing and curation, security, governance, and orchestration, to quickly enable analytics and insights for enterprise success.

In a nutshell, logical data fabric architecture provides support for enterprise governance and security that can be used for contextual information delivery and cataloging while serving as a single entry point for enforcing policies over enterprise data assets, to eliminate the need for direct access to physical data stores. Moreover, logical data fabric establishes a single unified access layer to all applicable data sources in addition to improving and accelerating data access. This architecture also improves security, safety, and risk aversion by establishing a single point from which to manage access credentials, user privileges, and other access specific parameters. 

The Role of Federal Agencies 

In the emerging new era of digital governance, governments require faster, more agile access to data, but traditional data architectures that rely on physical data movement cannot meet the increasingly real-time needs of modern government. 

Data virtualization, the foundational technology for logical data fabric, is very important because it provides access to quality data in a safe and secure manner to deliver better informed decisions benefiting citizens. To successfully implement digital transformation, federal agencies will need to undergo changes at many levels of the organization. In particular, they will need to strengthen security, safety, and risk tolerance. That’s one of the major benefits of logical data fabric for federal agencies that are modernizing to cloud based infrastructure.

Supported by logical data fabric and data virtualization, government agencies can enhance analytics by integrating a wide variety of different systems, and they can engage in more powerful analytics to aid in faster, more effective decisions. They can improve operations, by implementing systems for capturing real-time data from transactional systems.

Lastly, agencies need to optimize costs. Digitization itself is inherently costly, so agencies undergoing digital transformation must find ways to optimize costs and leverage an affordable solution with low maintenance cost. Fortunately, this is one of the standard benefits of implementing logical data fabric, since there is less of a need to replicate and store data.

The Future of Data Governance in a Post-Pandemic Era 

As stated above, keeping datasets well-organized by keeping them limited is no longer a viable strategy for any data-driven enterprise.

Automatic data capture offers obvious advantages by providing a comprehensive, retroactive dataset without any ongoing planning or manual implementation and data governance. However, for automatically captured data to be effective, two things are required: A data virtualization-powered logical data fabric, with which to construct a clean data set for analysis while maintaining all of the rich underlying data, and a set of built-in tools to keep data organized, accurate, and verified from the moment an event is defined.

In short, the context-rich, high-volume data available through automatic capture requires that data governance be a core architecture principle. A complete, well-governed dataset is the key to answering the questions that data teams have today. This is how data governance, with the help of an effective logical data fabric architecture, will lead to the development of extraordinary, innovative digital products and experiences. 

The approach government organizations take around governing their IT transformation goals internally can make or break their digitalization plans and impact their accountability and transparency for their external end-users. This is how data governance plays a crucial part in bringing IT Transformation to federal agencies, especially in a post-pandemic era. 

Neha Gurudatt
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