What is Information Governance?

Mitratech Holdings, Inc
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Managing and securing vital company data? It’s key to risk mitigation and regulatory compliance. So what’s driving that need, and what are various components of an Information Governance initiative?

The bedrock of modern business? Data and information. The amount of them being generated is growing at a seemingly exponential rate, and managing that flood is a gigantic task. Just two of the new data management complexities businesses must deal with..?

Coping With the Three V’s: More firms depend on Big Data, as defined by three key vectors – volume, variety, and velocity. They’re all growing fast, and mismanaging them can have dangerous consequences:

  • Facebook stores upwards of 250 billion photographs, belonging to its over 2 billion users.
  • Yet on the flip side, Facebook suffered great reputational damage in 2018 for how it used personal data and allowed others to use it.

Remote-Working Workforces: Today, more employees, stakeholders, and customers are dispersed in more locations than ever, and may want or require access to your files and data. Especially if you’re a large or global enterprise.

Many of them are now working remotely, on a variety of devices, so a company must ensure both access and maintain data security:

  • More U.S. corporate employees work from home than ever before, rising 140% from 2005-2018.
  • 4.3 million work from home at least half the time.
  • From 2015-2016, the telecommuter population grew by 11.7%, the biggest YOY growth since 2008.¹

¹GlobalWorkplaceAnalytics.com

How is data governance essential to success?

Information governance is an enterprise’s strategic approach to managing its information, whether in digital data, documents, or archival records, in order to support business outcomes.

It can involve a wide range of cross-disciplinary policies, procedures, controls, tools, and technologies that help a company meet regulatory, legal, and operational demands.  

By balancing the proper use of data and information against regulatory and security demands, information governance via proper data management can:

  • Maximize the value of that data to the company
  • Enable legal compliance and risk mitigation
  • Enhance operational transparency
  • Reduce likelihood, instances, and costs of legal discovery and  regulatory penalty

What falls under information governance?

There are multiple elements to any successful corporate information governance program, and here are just a few of the mainstays:

Access Governance

The practice of managing and reducing the risks caused by unnecessary access to data. Employees may have access to data not required for their role or work, for example, or may try to access data via unsecured channels.  Implementing it is often a matter of regulatory compliance, especially in sectors such as healthcare, financial services, or the legal industry.

Enterprise Content Management

ECM is the strategy and practice of capturing, managing, storing and delivering data and content by leveraging technology tools. ECM  allows an enterprise to manage its unstructured information, wherever that data resides across the organization.

Audit Trails

Audit trails (or audit logs) are chronological records that provide documentary evidence of the sequence of activities involved in a specific program, operations, workflow, or event. Capturing and preserving these, along with associated assets such as documents, messages, meeting records, et al, is critical in satisfying both internal reviews and regulatory oversight; a lack of a detailed audit trail can prove disastrous, especially in heavily-regulated industries.

Know Your Customer (KYC)

KYC is the process of verifying the identity of its clients or customers, and assessing any risks, especially legal or criminal, possible in that business relationship. KYC is a term that’s also specifically applied to the banking and anti-money-laundering regulations governing such activities.

Single Source of Truth

SSOT is the practice of structuring data models and architectures in such a way that every data element is stored just once, typically in a centralized d digital data management repository, in order to avoid duplicate or de-normalized versions. This way, everyone in an organization has access to the same authoritative data. 

 

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Mitratech Holdings, Inc
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