Steering the Ship: Data Discovery Governance with Captain Compliance

The journey into data discovery starts with charting the unknown, as there are many icebergs along the way your business must circumvent to avoid non-compliance penalties. Since data is the top commodity of the digital age, knowing how to keep it secure should be a top priority.

Captain Compliance is your trusted data compliance partner. Our task is to help businesses establish systems to handle and safeguard their data in a legally sound way. How governance is enacted regarding data discovery can decide between a data breach and safe operations.

As we face increasingly sophisticated cyber threats and handle more extensive databases daily, businesses must enact specific data handling policies to mitigate risk and ensure their consumer trust relation remains impeccable.

Key Takeaways

• Data Governance is Crucial For Compliance & Decision Making: Understanding where your data resides and its sensitivity is crucial for achieving compliance and enhancing data quality and integrity. Good quality data will ensure your divisions are backed by sound intel.
• Collaborative Efforts and Continuous Updates are Key for Governance: Reinventing the best practices and repeating common mistakes is not the way to go in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Collaborating with a compliance expert can save you time and resources.
• Education from the Top Down is Paramount in Risk Prevention: A company is the sum of its working parts, and if you can provide the needed education to every employee, you can receive valuable feedback on improving your systems and lessen the risk of data mishandling.

In 2024, notable fines related to data discovery governance and privacy breaches have continued to rise, reflecting the increasing importance of stringent data management practices. For instance, there were significant GDPR fines issued for various breaches, including a €1.2 billion fine to Meta for inadequate data protection during EU-US data transfers and a €345 million fine to TikTok for violating children’s data privacy​.

The growing focus on data governance is also evident in the US, where violations under laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have led to substantial fines. These regulations are pushing companies to adopt better data governance and discovery practices to avoid hefty penalties and protect their reputations​​.

Overall, the trend in 2024 underscores the critical need for organizations to implement robust data governance frameworks to navigate the complex regulatory landscape and minimize the risk of significant financial and reputational damage.

The Essence of Data Discovery Governance

Data discovery governance is the process through which businesses can identify, classify, and manage their data repositories throughout the entire ecosystem. Understanding where data resides is only the first step; determining how your data flows, where it originates, and how it interacts alongside the access dynamics are all equally critical.

Data discovery on its own serves to help you keep track of and explore dark sectors of data scattered throughout your business organization. This process improves operational efficiency and is the starting point for classifying data types and imposing governance policies to ensure security.

In today’s digitized world, consumer information is protected by regulations like the GDPR or CCPA that aim to set a global standard for handling and protecting their privacy rights.

The primary purpose of consumer data and privacy regulations can be broken down in this way:

• All privacy regulations and laws have specific requirements for how a business interacts with sensitive consumer information.
• As such, there are a plethora of clauses within these privacy laws that deal with data governance and, more specifically, how it is stored and protected from unauthorized access.
• In essence, it can be said that data discovery is a pre-emptive attempt to discover and tackle data vulnerabilities and help categorize and apply legal regulations to said data.

Now that we have a rough overview of the importance of data governance, let’s see how it positively affects your agency as a business.

How Data Governance Shapes Data-driven Decisions and Compliance

Data governance touches almost every facet of your entire business operation. One of the pillars of data governance revolves around ensuring all data used for decision-making is categorized, error-free, and accurate.

When you account for even the most remote data repositories via data discovery and don’t have hidden or hard-to-access data, your business can make decisions that conclude a greater technical depth.

Here are the key points showing how data governance shapes informed decision-making:

• Data discovery can be only as efficient as the quality of the data it parses through – Data storage conventions can greatly help elevate your data accessibility.
• Your business must use uniform standards for how data is classified, stored, and accessed throughout all departments.
• When the quality of data being evaluated is kept at a high standard, leadership can make decisions anchored in reality rather than un-quantified assumptions.

At the highest level of data discovery, your business can see patterns and inter-database relationships to create sophisticated data visualization heat maps to identify potential weak points.

Once you can predict future venues of possible data incursions, even if you prevent just a single data breach, your business can save a great deal from penalties and fines.

Real-world Stories Showcasing the Transformative Power of Data Discovery Governance

As we move more into practices where employees of any level have to deal with increasing data sets and operate more complex software systems, we have seen some real examples of the power of data discovery governance.

Here are some of the key examples that helped multiple industries and business types practice regulatory compliance when faced with challenges:

• In recent years, the pandemic highlighted multiple vulnerabilities in global supply chains. Companies with proper data governance had a clearer view of their inventory, suppliers, and logistics, allowing them to rapidly adapt to disruptions. In a publication by Deloitte, data governance was recognized as being at the forefront of legally sound governance frameworks.
• Businesses across retail and finance sectors are increasingly relying on AI for insights and automation. Proper data governance ensures that the data feeding these algorithms is accurate, unbiased, and high quality. This directly translates to better, more reliable AI outcomes.
• Due to the wide adoption of remote working and globalized hiring, cloud adoption was a massive surge. Data governance ensured data migration to the cloud was done securely and efficiently, without data duplication or loss. Employees could access necessary data from their homes without compromising data integrity or security.
• The Department of Defence saw a need to unify its databases from the hundreds of contracting companies. This meant relocating to cloud-based storage solutions, proprietarily developed to address data fragmentation. As their security standards are of the highest demand, this led to the proliferation of new zero-trust computing environments.

It is certain that leveraging the power of next-generation technologies can help us index and access information in a way that allows centralization and universal procedures.

The Challenges of Data Governance

Unveiling the complexities of data management and governance

The complexity of data management can be broken down into the three most important metrics when it comes to data:

• Data Volume: Due to the sheer volume of data businesses generate, process, and store, managing such vast amounts can become overwhelming without the right software solutions or data centers.
• Data Variety: Data isn’t just a binary or integer value; in practice, businesses must handle various types, from customer feedback to images, videos, logs, and more.
• Data Velocity: The rate at which data is generated, processed, and changed is staggering, making real-time governance challenging.

Even if your business has all of the data neatly stored, without optimization and the proper hardware performance, it can create bottlenecks in production sales and even lead to slower reaction times in patching a vulnerability.

Challenges of unstructured data and inconsistent governance practices

Unstructured data is often at the forefront of data-related incidents, especially when third-party vendors misuse your business information. By its very nature of being unstructured, it is much more challenging to catalog, search, and manage than structured data.

Furthermore, without a robust governance framework, different departments or teams might handle data differently. Lack of standardization often goes hand in hand with unstructured data being generated, stored somewhere, and forgotten.

• If your business has unstructured data exposed during an audit, said data can contain multiple violations of regulations like the GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA that deal with data governing requirements.

One of the foundational blocks of regulatory compliance standards involves storage limitation, data minimization, and accuracy. How can, then, having data without a purpose and without any set confidentiality limitations not become a recipe for a lawsuit disaster?

How data discovery governance helps organizations navigate the seas of data management

Data discovery can amend the dangers of dark data sectors of unseen and uncategorized information. The biggest dangers to your business are the ones you are unaware exist. There was never a case when a data breach happened due to anything other than unknown issues.

When you discover hidden vulnerabilities, you can patch them before they become an exploit and, even more so, use them as an asset or opportunity.

With well-governed data, employees don’t waste time searching for information or questioning its accuracy. Time is also another vital issue that can arise from a lack of data discovery efficiency:

• Suppose just one human has to find a missing word from a small sentence; even if the process is inefficient, it won’t take long.
• When a thousand employees have to parse the text data volume equivalent of all books ever written, the operations will crawl to a halt.
• This issue of slow data processing is one of the driving factors of negative reviews and dissatisfaction, especially in fields like online banking.

Even machines can struggle with inefficient algorithms. If a software program encounters a runtime error when parsing through a data set, it will drain valuable time from staff members to patch the issue.

When there are many small holes of inefficiency in the hull of your business enterprise, the entire operation can go down.

Captain Compliance’s Approach to Data Discovery Governance

Recognizing that data is the backbone of modern businesses, we at Captain Compliance firmly believe that proper data governance isn’t just a compliance necessity but the key to sustainable business growth and innovation.

We understand that navigating the unpredictable changing currents of regulations is hard to manage without outside help. Effective governance is a team effort, and outsourcing compliance can save you valuable time, as we already know which threats to look out for and how to find them.

Leveraging Technology and Best Practices for Effective Governance

We utilize the latest data discovery technology and methods, ensuring that every piece of data, from structured databases to unstructured documents, is identified and cataloged. We believe that education is critical to a legally compliant business operation.

Furthermore, Captain Compliance invests heavily in training teams on best practices, ensuring that the human element of governance is as vital as the technological one. When individual employees all understand how to use your internal tools properly, you can significantly minimize non-compliance risk.

Streamlining Compliance with Data Privacy Regulations

Not all data types are created equal. Some pieces of information, like PII or financial records, are more sensitive than others. Data discovery governance helps organizations tag and monitor such data, ensuring it’s treated with the necessary care.

We at Captain Compliance believe technology is here to help you automate specific processes that are otherwise impossible to track when operated by a human element. Automated data discovery solutions can be equipped with features that mask and tag sensitive data so that access to it becomes restricted.

This is why we offer guidance on selecting the right compliance solutions for your data discovery endeavors.

Many data protection regulations, like GDPR, emphasize the principle of data minimization, which is that you are only to collect and retain the data that is absolutely necessary. Data discovery tools can aid your business in quickly identifying redundant or unnecessary data.

When dealing with a data volume-rich world, knowing which data should be retained and which should not is paramount to efficiency.

It is also worth considering which consumer information you are allowed to remove or delete.

Many records must be kept for a set amount of years, and you need to know how to handle user data deletion or amendment requests.

Data discovery governance tools can help enforce role-based access controls to prevent access-related data breaches.

Remember that some jurisdictions within the USA and Europe have laws dictating that data about their citizens must be stored within their borders. When dealing with specific data discovery storage solutions that are cloud-based, it’s incredibly vital to know the legal intricacies of where said data servers are located.

This is also crucial to consider when selecting a third-party vendor to do business with. Knowing where they store data handled from your end is required by default from many compliance standards. Read more on our detailed guide on Third-Party Risk Assessment.

Navigating Data Governance

Strategies for Implementing Effective Data Discovery Governance

By this point, you should have a general overview of what data discovery is, its relation to governance requirements, and considerations to take when accounting for regulatory compliance.

We can now explore some actionable steps that your business can implement to ensure it stays effective and legally compliant when performing data mapping and governance:

• Establish systems within your business for employees of any rank to report and offer feedback on tools they use for data governance.
• Have specialized training to educate employees on the differences between data types and how to act when a data breach is suspected.
• Install early warning systems that flag suspicious activity when data discovery tools yield novel data transit pathways that were unaccounted for.
• Partner with external experts to receive insights not limited to your business looking from the inside out. There is no need to waste precious time and resources reinventing already established best practices.

Closing

In anticipation of what tomorrow’s technological data leaps will introduce and help volumes grow exponentially, businesses must start preparing and adapting today.

With the introduction and worldwide adoption of systems like the Blockchain or the IoT, your business will have to thread in the wild west of regulatory landscape changes.

At Captain Compliance, our primary goal is to help your business prepare and actively adapt to any new changes in regulation and safely reap the rewards of data discovery.

Contact us to discuss a tailored solution for your exact business and have your data properly accounted for and compliant.

FAQ:

What is Data Discovery In Data Governance?

Data discovery in data governs the process of locating, understanding, and cataloging data types and assets across your business organization. This process includes finding where data resides, its sensitivity, and who and how to access it.

Find more on the data discovery tools at your disposal to explore the data landscape.

What Are the Four Pillars of Data Governance?

The four pillars of data governance are:

1. Data Quality: Ensuring data is accurate, consistent, and usable.
2. Data Security: Safeguarding data against unauthorized access and breaches.
3. Data Integration: Ensuring that data is easily accessible, shareable, and can be seamlessly integrated across platforms.
4. Data Stewardship: Assigning responsibility to individuals or teams for maintaining and overseeing specific data assets.

Read more on how to perform a Data Risk Assessment.

What Are the 3 Critical Elements of Good Data Governance?

The three critical elements of good data governance are:

1. Policies and Procedures: Clearly defined rules outlining how data should be handled, stored, and accessed.
2. People: Designated roles such as data stewards, data owners, and governance boards that oversee and implement governance activities.
3. Technology: Tools and systems that automate, enforce, and monitor compliance with data governance policies.

Learn the importance of Data Mapping documentation in Compliance Services.

What is Meant by Data Governance?

Data governance is the way you process any stored information within your business. It includes who has access controls, what systems are built in place to safeguard sensitive consumer information, and what steps are in place should a data incident occur to mitigate the damage.

Discover the best practices in Data Mapping for your business.